The Cost of These Dreams Read online

  As he turns 50, MJ is wondering where there are any more asses to kick.

  CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Five weeks before his 50th birthday, Michael Jordan sits behind his desk, overlooking a parking garage in downtown Charlotte. The cell phone in front of him buzzes with potential trades and league proposals about placing ads on jerseys. A rival wants his best players and wants to give him nothing in return. Jordan bristles. He holds a Cuban cigar in his hand. Smoking is allowed.

  “Well, shit, being as I own the building,” he says, laughing.

  Back in the office after his vacation on a 154-foot rented yacht named Mister Terrible, he feels that relaxation slipping away. He feels pulled inward, toward his own most valuable and destructive traits. Slights roll through his mind, eating at him: worst record ever, can’t build a team, absentee landlord. Jordan reads the things written about him, the fuel arriving in a packet of clips his staff prepares. He knows what people say. He needs to know. There’s a palpable simmering whenever you’re around Jordan, as if Air Jordan is still in there, churning, trying to escape. It must be strange to be locked in combat with the ghost of your former self.

  Smoke curls off the cigar. He wears slacks and a plain white dress shirt, monogrammed on the sleeve in white, understated. An ID badge hangs from one of those zip line cords on his belt, with his name on the bottom: Michael Jordan, just in case anyone didn’t recognize the owner of a struggling franchise who in another life was the touchstone for a generation. There’s a shudder in every child of the ’80s and ’90s who does the math and realizes that Michael Jordan is turning 50. Where did the years go? Jordan has trouble believing it, difficulty admitting it to himself. But he’s in the mood for admissions today, and there’s a look on his face, a half-smile, as he considers how far to go.

  “I . . . I always thought I would die young,” he says, leaning up to rap his knuckles on the rich, dark wood of his desk.

  He has kept this fact a secret from most people. A fatalist obsession didn’t go with his public image and, well, it’s sort of strange. His mother would get angry with him when he’d talk to her about it. He just could never imagine being old. He seemed too powerful, too young, and death was more likely than a slow decline. The universe might take him, but it would not permit him to suffer the graceless loss and failure of aging. A tragic flaw could undo him but never anything as common as bad knees or failing eyesight.

  Later that night, standing in his kitchen, he squints across his loft at the television. His friend Quinn Buckner catches him.

  “You gonna need to get some glasses,” Buckner says.

  “I can see,” Jordan says.

  “Don’t be bullshitting me,” Buckner says. “I can see you struggling.”

  “I can see,” Jordan insists.

  The television is built into the modern stone fireplace in his sprawling downtown condo, the windows around them overlooking South Tryon Street. An open bottle of Pahlmeyer merlot sits on an end table. Buckner, a former NBA guard from near Chicago and a Pacers broadcaster, is in town for an upcoming game. They’ve been talking, about Jordan’s birthday and about the changes in his life, all seeming to happen at once. Jordan feels in transition. He moved out of his house in Chicago and is moving into a new one in Florida in three weeks. He’s engaged. Inside he’s dealing, finally, with the cost of his own competitive urges, asking himself difficult questions. To what must he say goodbye? What is there to look forward to? Catching an introspective Jordan is like finding a spotted owl, but here he is, considering himself. His fiancée, Yvette Prieto, and her friend Laura laugh over near the kitchen island. Jordan relights his cigar. It keeps going out.

  “Listen,” Buckner says, “Father Time ain’t lost yet.”

  The idea hangs in the air.

  “Damn,” Buckner continues. “Fifty.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Can you believe it?” Jordan says quietly, and it sounds like he’s talking to himself.

  * * *

  —

  A day before, Jordan had flown to Charlotte from Chicago, a trip he’s made many times. This flight was different from all the others. When his Gulfstream IV, which is painted to look like a sneaker, took off and turned south, he no longer lived in the city where he had moved in 1984. The past months had been consumed with a final flurry of packing, putting the first half of his life in boxes. He has felt many emotions in his 50 years: hope and anger, disappointment, joy and despair. But lately there’s been a feeling that would have disgusted the 30-year-old version of himself: nostalgia.

  The packing and cataloging started several years ago, after his divorce. One night at his suburban Chicago mansion, he sat on the floor of his closet with Estee Portnoy. She manages his business enterprises and, since the divorce, much of his personal life—his consigliere. It was 1 in the morning. They were flummoxed by a safe. Jordan hadn’t opened it in years, and he couldn’t remember the combination. Everything else stopped as this consumed him. After 10 failed attempts, the safe would go into a security shutdown and need to be blown open. None of the usual numbers worked. Nine different combinations failed; they had one try left. Jordan focused. He decided it had to be a combination of his birthday, February 17, and old basketball numbers. He typed in six digits: 9, 2, 1, 7, 4, 5. Click. The door swung open, and he reached in, rediscovering his gold medal from the 1984 Olympics. It wasn’t really gold anymore. It looked tarnished, changed—a duller version of itself.

  The memories came to him, how he felt then. “It was very pure, if I can say it right,” he’d explain later. “It was pure in 1984 . . . I was still dreaming.” During the Olympics, he was deep in negotiations with Nike for his first shoe contract. He traded pins with other athletes. Eight years later, when he was the most famous person in the world and the Dream Team was forced to stay outside the Olympic Village, he’d be disappointed when that separation kept him from swapping pins again.

  Jordan saw an old pair of shorts that didn’t fit anymore. He found first-edition Air Jordans. In his cavernous Nike closet, he counted nearly 5,000 boxes of shoes, some of which he marked to keep, others to give to friends. There was his uniform for the Dream Team. An employee found letters he’d written his parents as a college student at North Carolina, and what struck her as she flipped through the pages was how normal he seemed. Despite all the things that had been gained in the years since, that person had been lost. The kid in the letters hadn’t yet been hardened by wealth and fame and pressure. He told his parents about grades, and practice, and the food in the dining hall. He always needed money. One letter ended: P.S. Please send stamps.

  For a rage-filled day and a half, he thought he’d lost two of his Bulls championship rings, No. 3 and No. 5. He tore the house apart screaming, “Who stole my rings? Who stole No. 5?”

  “You talk about a mad fucking panic,” he says.

  Following the final title, the Bulls presented him a case with room for all six rings, but Jordan had never put them together. Now as he found them spread around the house, he slipped each one into its slot. He began plotting amendments to his will that if the missing rings emerged for sale after his death, they should be returned immediately to his estate. Buying a duplicate wouldn’t be worth it, because even if he didn’t tell anyone, he’d know. Finally the missing rings were found in a memorabilia room, and the set of six was complete. He could exhale and continue packing.

  He discovered old home movies, seeing his young kids. They’re all in or out of college now. Warmups had collected dust alongside his baseball cleats and a collection of bats and gloves. The astonishing thing to him was how much he enjoyed this. “At 30 I was moving so fast,” he says. “I never had time to think about all the things I was encountering, all the things I was touching. Now when I go back and find these things, it triggers so many different thoughts: God, I forgot about that. That’s how fast we were moving. Now I can slow it down and hopefully remember what
that meant. That’s when I know I’m getting old.”

  He laughs, knowing how this sounds, like a man in a midlife crisis, looking fondly at something that’s never coming back.

  “I value that,” he says. “I like reminiscing. I do it more now watching basketball than anything. Man, I wish I was playing right now. I would give up everything now to go back and play the game of basketball.”

  “How do you replace it?” he’s asked.

  “You don’t. You learn to live with it.”

  “How?”

  “It’s a process,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  The remembering continues in Charlotte, with Jordan and his best friend, George Koehler, crowding around an iPad map, trying to find Jordan’s first house in Chicago.

  There’s circular poetry about George being here. When Jordan first landed in Chicago in 1984, he stepped out of O’Hare and found that the Bulls had neglected to send anyone to get him. Still a country boy, Jordan was nervous and uncertain. A young limo driver saw him and gave him a ride. That was George, and he’s been with Jordan ever since. They’re together much of the time. Jordan trusts Koehler completely. Koehler might have more famous athletes programmed into his phone than anyone on the planet, since one of the best ways to find Jordan is to call George.

  “Where you looking at?” George asks, pointing.

  “Essex Drive,” Jordan says, finding his old street. “I remember going up to that McDonald’s and getting my damn McRib. When I first got there.”

  There was a finished basement in that place. Charles Oakley lived behind him. So did another Bulls forward, Rod Higgins, who runs the Bobcats’ basketball operations. The basement had a hot tub and a pool table that could be converted for pingpong. They’d play for hours, listening over and over to the first Whitney Houston album. Last year Jordan was sitting on the Bobcats’ bench with Curtis Polk, his lawyer and a team executive, when Polk received a text saying Houston had died. Her death really affected Jordan, not because he and Houston were close friends but because it made him aware of his own mortality. It made him measure the distance between 50 and pingpong on Essex Drive.

  “They had some battles down there,” George says, laughing.

  “Me and Oak,” Jordan says.

  Higgins is standing with them and is looking at the map too.

  “I used to kill him in pool,” Jordan says, nodding toward Rod.

  “I got a different version,” Higgins cracks.

  “Kill or be killed,” Jordan woofs. “Losing is killing.”

  There’s an unspoken shadow over the stories about that town house on Essex Drive. James Jordan remodeled the basement for his son. Did all the work himself, because he’d never let Michael pay for something he could do on his own. The first winter, while Michael was out of town for the All-Star Game, his pipes froze. His dad ripped out the walls, replacing the pipes himself, patching and repainting when he finished. He spent two weeks fixing his son’s home. James and Mike—that’s where all this nostalgia has been headed, from the moment it began.

  Dear Mama and Pops . . . Please send stamps.

  * * *

  —

  George Koehler looks down at the ring on his finger. It’s from the Bulls’ first championship. Jordan gave replicas to family and close friends.

  “I don’t know if I ever told you the story why I wear this ring,” George says.

  “Nope,” Jordan says.

  “I made a promise to your dad,” George says.

  George was always scared he’d get robbed, so he kept the ring at home. James, known to everyone as Pops, busted him: “Where’s your ring? My son didn’t spend his money to have you put that shit in a drawer.”

  “I can hear him saying it,” Jordan says, smiling.

  Pops told George that if someone stole his ring, “we’ll get you another one.”

  Jordan roars over the word “we.”

  “I like that,” he says, his shoulders heaving. “That sounds like him too.”

  “After what happened to him,” George says, “I wear the ring.”

  Memories come back. The day Pops was killed, he was scheduled to fly to Chicago. He’d called George the night before to ask for a ride. George waited at O’Hare, but Pops never came out. A half hour passed, and George called Mama J, his name for Deloris Jordan. Just wait, she said. Pops probably missed his plane. Two or three hours later, the next flight from Charlotte landed. Pops didn’t get off the plane. George dialed Mama J again, and she said that something must have come up and that Pops would call. Pops never called.

  “Fucker,” George finally says, clearing his throat, “made me cry.”

  George tries to change the subject. He is attuned to Jordan’s moods and knows that when Michael gets sad, he becomes quiet, withdrawn, turning inward.

  “You know how many jump shots I took to get this thing?” George jokes.

  “Played your ass off, George,” Jordan shoots back.

  But the ghost of Pops is in the room now. “He never met my fiancée,” Jordan says. “He never got to see my kids grow up. He died in ’93. Jasmine was a year old. Marcus was 3 years old. Jeffrey was 5 years old.”

  “Where do you most feel your dad’s presence?” he’s asked.

  Five seconds pass, then 10. Silence. He leans back into his chair, limp, his paunch noticeable for the first time. The sky outside is gray. He scrunches his mouth, rubs his neck. Suddenly he looks older, his eyes glassy, and even 20 years after his father was murdered—robbed of a Lexus and two championship rings given to him by his son—it’s clear that Jordan still needs his dad. He finally answers.

  “Probably with him,” Jordan says, nodding toward George.

  On the floor, leaning against the wall, waiting to be hung, is a framed print Jordan moved here from Chicago. It’s of an empty arena, dark and quiet, with a bright white light coming out of the open tunnel doors, beckoning. Really, it’s about dealing with losses: with aging, with retirement, with death. In it, Jordan is walking toward the light and there’s a ghost walking next to him, with a hand on his shoulder. It’s his dad.

  “The thing we’d do,” he says, “we’d stay up all night and watch cowboy movies. Westerns.”

  Jordan still watches them obsessively, and it’s easy to imagine he does it to feel the presence of his father. One of his employees joked that she’d rather fly commercial than on Jordan’s Gulfstream because a passenger on his plane is subjected to hours of shootouts and showdowns.

  “Name a Western,” George says. “He’ll tell you the beginning, middle, and end.”

  “I watch ’em all the time,” Jordan says. “I watch Marshal Dillon. I watch all of ’em.”

  “I think his favorite Western is my favorite Western,” George says.

  “You and I have three we really like,” Jordan says.

  “Outlaw Josey Wales,” George says.

  “That’s my favorite,” Jordan says.

  “Two Mules . . . ,” George begins.

  “. . . for Sister Sara,” Jordan finishes.

  “The other one I like is Unforgiven,” George says.

  “My father loved that,” Jordan says.

  * * *

  —

  The opposite of this creeping nostalgia is the way Jordan has always collected slights, inventing them—nurturing them. He can be a breathtaking asshole: self-centered, bullying, and cruel. That’s the ugly side of greatness. He’s a killer, in the Darwinian sense of the word, immediately sensing and attacking someone’s weakest spot. He’d moo like a cow when the overweight general manager of the Bulls, Jerry Krause, would get onto the team bus. When the Bulls traded for the injury-prone Bill Cartwright, Jordan teased him as Medical Bill, and he once punched Will Perdue during practice. He punched Steve Kerr, too, and who knows how many other people.

>   This started at an early age. Jordan genuinely believed his father liked his older brother, Larry, more than he liked him, and he used that insecurity as motivation. He burned, and thought if he succeeded, he would demand an equal share of affection. His whole life has been about proving things, to the people around him, to strangers, to himself. This has been successful and spectacularly unhealthy. If the boy in those letters from Chapel Hill is gone, it is this appetite to prove—to attack and to dominate and to win—that killed him. In the many biographies written about Jordan, most notably in David Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps, a common word used to describe Jordan is “rage.” Jordan might have stopped playing basketball, but the rage is still there. The fire remains, which is why he searches for release, on the golf course or at a blackjack table, why he spends so much time and energy on his basketball team and why he dreams of returning to play.

  He’s in his suite at the Bobcats’ arena, just before tip-off of another loss, annoyed that one of his players is talking to the opponents. Tonight he’s going to sit on the bench, to send a message that the boss is watching. He used to sit there a lot, but he got a few phone calls from NBA commissioner David Stern telling him to chill with the screaming at officials. Mostly he watches in private, for good reason. Once, when he was an executive with the Washington Wizards, mad at how the team was playing, he hurled a beer can at his office television, then launched whatever he could find after it, a fusillade of workplace missiles. Now, 10 years later, he mostly just yells.

  “I’m going downstairs,” he says.

  “Be nice,” someone in the suite says.

  “I’ll try,” he says, and is out the door.

  * * *

  —

  The inner circle stays behind, gathered in Suite 27, just across the concourse from the executive offices. They’ve all been around for years, some from the very beginning. Estee Portnoy is here, and George. Rod Higgins and Bobcats president Fred Whitfield, an old friend from North Carolina, come and go. They’re waiting on Jordan to return after the game, killing time, handling work stuff, telling stories.