On His Majesty’s Secret Service

Theories abound as to the reasons for Michael Jordan’s premature first retirement in 1993, at the peak of his powers.  When Jordan left basketball in 1993 it was as if Jesus had walked on water, delivered the sermon on the mount, but then decided to return to a life as a quiet carpenter rather than enter Jerusalem on his donkey and inaugurate the sequence of events that would lead to his crucifixion and subsequent resurrection.   Indeed, after a young Jordan had torched Larry Bird’s Celtics for 63 points in a playoff game, Bird famously quipped “that was God disguised as Michael Jordan.”  By the 1993 NBA Finals Jordan was obviously so much better than everyone else that he was, essentially, temporarily immortal.  And, it seemed, the best was yet to come.  But by October of 1993, Jordan walked away from it all, voluntarily reentering this mortal coil.  Why?

           

            To solve this mystery it is necessary to dispose of the theories that have been making the rounds since 1993.  But first it is important to differentiate Jordan from Bjorn Borg, whose 11 major titles along with his seemingly inscrutable retirement from tennis while still at his physical peak at age 26, may at first glance tempt us to simply pair Michael Jordan circa 1993 with Borg; two rock star athletes who shone brightly and then faded fast.  But in reality the circumstances surrounding Jordan’s and Borg’s respective retirements are in stark contrast.  Borg’s retirement was astonishing only in the sense that Borg was astonished that he had been beaten.  Winning five consecutive Wimbledon’s and being branded a sex symbol in the process had bred in Borg a sense of entitlement.   Tennis was his.  When that brash young New Yorker McEnroe had dared to share tennis’ center stage with Borg, crafting a “rivalry”, Borg was suddenly at sea.  His retirement was nothing more than a case of the child who refuses to share his toys, and instead tromps off the playground and takes them home.  Michael Jordan had no McEnroe.  Basketball, in 1993, was his.

            Which brings us to the first possible theory for Michael Jordan’s early retirement:  he had become so good that it just wasn’t fun anymore, as there wasn’t enough of a challenge.  This argument ignores the central organizing feature of the competitive professional athlete’s psyche, i.e. “It’s good to be king.”  Don’t think for a minute that Jordan didn’t relish every minute of the butt whipping he put on Charles Barkley in the ’93 Finals.  Putatively the ’93 Finals pitted the Chicago Bulls against the Phoenix Suns.  But legendary players like Jordan, Bird, and Barkley literally ARE their teams, making the ’93 Finals effectively Jordan vs. Barkley. This provided Jordan with the opportunity to definitively assert his dominance over Barkley, a player so menacing and physically powerful that he manhandled other power forwards, despite generally giving up a half-foot or more in size (Barkley was generously listed at 6’6”).  Jordan played the best basketball of his career in the ’93 Finals, meaning the best basketball that has ever been played, and in the process crushed Barkley’s will.  Barkley is reported to have realized during the ’93 Finals that he would never be able to beat Jordan.  The 1993 NBA Finals were officially won by the Chicago Bulls; the real triumph was that a man with Barkley’s outsized ego and genius level physical gifts was completely subjugated by Jordan’s dominance.   If you think Jordan didn’t enjoy that then you don’t know the first thing about men.

            Jordan publicly stated at the press conference for his retirement in October of 1993 that he was leaving professional basketball in order to spend more time with his family.  This reason has been given at countless retirement press conferences by celebrities of all stripes, and is a socially acceptable way of stating that one does not wish to give the real reason for one’s retirement.  Like the vast majority of those who had offered this explanation before him, Jordan subsequently spent no more time with his family then he had before retirement.  Playing minor league baseball, Jordan’s retirement activity, required endless hours on buses between minor league burgs.  Jordan, no fool, spent a small portion of his millions on outfitting a charter-style bus with every available luxury, except, of course, a compartment for his family.  As always, the wife and kids stayed home while Jordan was interminably on the road.  Scratch “more time with the family” off the list.

            So did Jordan really quit basketball to pursue his lifelong dream of playing professional baseball?  Perhaps if Jordan had only half the talent at baseball that he did at basketball, which would have made him a heckuva big league player, this argument might hold water.  But Jordan was in over his head as a minor leaguer, and was never more than a novelty act.  Imagine Tiger Woods quitting golf tomorrow in order to pursue his dream of playing professional tennis.  Picture Tiger playing satellite tennis events in Toledo, a couple hundred bucks at stake as he struggles to lift his ranking from #1,047 to #983 in the world, and you can begin to get a sense of the absurdity in play here.  This, plumbing in Toledo instead of acting on Broadway, was effectively what Michael Jordan, Sports Illustrated’s Greatest North American Athlete of the Twentieth Century, was doing in the summer of 1994.  Something, much deeper than a boyhood dream of playing baseball, was at work.

            Which inevitably brings the conspiracy theorists into play.  The conspiracy theory goes as follows:  Jordan, an inveterate gambler, had wracked up seven figure gambling debts to seedy criminal types, attracting the attention of league commissioner David Stern.  An official NBA investigation was well underway during the 1993 offseason.  Per conspiracy theory, Jordan made a backroom deal with Stern, proffering a premature “retirement” in lieu of punishment for betting on sports.  Which makes perfect sense, if you’re talking about Pete Rose.  Like Rose, Jordan is, for whatever reason, drawn to the unseemly world of high stakes gambling.  Unlike Rose, Jordan is nobody’s idiot, as evidenced by the hundreds of millions of dollars that Jordan made OFF the court as the greatest celebrity pitchman in history. 

Jordan gratified his gambling jones at casino tables and at the golf course, obtaining whatever satisfaction is to be derived from losing millions of dollars, and perhaps winning some of it back, in those settings.  But Jordan is simply too savvy, too cunning, to piss it all away by betting on sports.  Rose already has that pathetic angle covered.  Stern’s investigation into Jordan’s gambling quietly ended three days after Jordan’s retirement.  Stern undoubtedly learned that Jordan’s gambling habit brought Jordan into contact with what may politely be referred to as society’s less desirable element.  But there is nothing in the NBA collective bargaining agreement that says you can’t lose a million dollars on the golf course to a scum bag.  Say what you will about Stern, about whom conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen, but if he had learned in 1993 that Jordan had bet on NBA games there is absolutely no way Jordan is back in the league a year and a half later.  Stern, even more savvy and cunning than Jordan, knows more than a little about covering his own ass.

The most plausible of all the existent Jordan retirement theories is that he was overcome by grief at the senseless murder of his father, James Jordan, in July of 1993 at the hands of a pair of two-bit thieves.  Indeed, nothing signals to a man the finality of his own mortality more than the death of his father.  But at the time of his father’s death, Jordan had already ascended to temporary immortality; James Jordan’s death did nothing to diminish Jordan’s exalted status.  Had Jordan responded to his father’s death within the framework of basketball it would likely have been to dedicate his efforts on the court to the memory of his father.  Jordan’s premature exit from basketball was in response to a threat to his immortality, but this threat had nothing to do with his father’s death.  Jordan would have known that his own immortality was in no way dependent upon his father’s corporeal existence.  Since Jordan’s temporary immortality had been won on the basketball courts, it was only there that it could be lost.  Enter, stage left, John Starks.

We all have a role to play in fate, no less so John Starks.  Starks’ preordained collision with Jordan was prefigured by the circumstances of his employment by the New York Knicks.  While trying out for the Knicks in 1990, Starks, a tenacious competitor who worked his way into the NBA by way of bagging groceries and navigating a series of community colleges before landing at Oklahoma State, attempted to deliver a dunk in the face of the Knicks Goliath all-star center, Patrick Ewing.  Ewing, appropriately, was having none of it and tossed Starks to the hardwood.  Starks hurt his knee, and due to the severity and duration of the injury the Knicks were unable (under the collective bargaining agreement) to cut Starks; they ended up keeping him and Starks, inevitably, made the most of this shot. 

Fast forward to the 1993 NBA playoffs.  Starks, by now, is entrenched as the Knicks starting shooting guard.  The Knicks are at home in a preliminary round playoff game against Jordan’s Bulls.  In a tight game with 50 seconds remaining in regulation, Starks has the ball in his hands on the perimeter.  Starks, who has a great burst, accelerates easily past his defender and thrusts towards the basket.  In his way is the relatively accomplished Bulls power forward, Horace Grant, who at 6’10” has Starks by five inches.  But Starks demolishes Grant with one of the most explosive dunks in NBA history.  All well and good, and as fantastic as the dunk was, if that was all that had occurred it would have made for a nice ESPN highlight and been forgotten by the next morning’s coffee.  Watching video of the dunk it is clear that the facial is delivered to Grant.  But at the last moment, as Starks delivers the ball through the basket, Jordan enters the frame.  Like the well trained Tar Heel that he was, Jordan was attempting to bail Grant out by providing some much needed “help defense”.   By doing so, Jordan allowed himself to be caught in a still photograph as if he, not Grant, were receiving the facial from Starks. 

By the fall of 1993 this false image, that of Starks humiliating Jordan, had become a truth.  Nothing is more potent in the imagination of the adolescent male than the images found in the posters that adorn his bedroom wall.  Jordan’s temporary immortality lived in the collective imagination of adolescent boys everywhere, a reality illuminated by Jordan iconography hanging on millions of adolescent bedroom walls.  The poster of John Starks dunking over Michael Jordan, though trafficking in illusion, hung on enough walls that the cloud of adolescent adoration on which Air Jordan had ascended to heaven, had begun to noticeably dissipate.  In order to repair the (highly lucrative) symbolic order that governed professional basketball, a symbolic order dependent upon Jordan’s nonpareil status, Starks would have to be punished for a crime he did not commit. 

In order for the symbolic order to be reestablished, a number of remarkable events necessarily had to occur.  First and foremost among these was Jordan’s retirement.  Starks’ punishment would require that he take professional basketball’s biggest stage, the NBA Finals.  In order to get there, Starks’ Knicks would have to first defeat Jordan’s Bulls, which was, of course, impossible.  Jordan’s retirement is so mysterious precisely because it is dependent on an event that is to occur later, temporally.  The cause of Jordan’s retirement was the necessity, per the requirements of the symbolic order, of John Starks’ appearance in the NBA Finals some nine months later.  Jordan himself had no idea why he was retiring, as evidenced by his vapid explanations and lack of any alternative plans at his retirement press conference.  (Cause and effect were still operative in this sequence of events, but they were not bound by the illusion of the linear flow of time from past to present to future that so beguiles us humans.)

With Jordan removed from the scene during the 1993-94 NBA season, the Knicks quickly became the preeminent team in the NBA’s Eastern Conference Scottie Pippen, the Bulls new on-court “leader” in the absence of Jordan, knew better than to upset the symbolic order by leading the Bulls to a championship sans Jordan. In the 1994 Eastern Conference semifinals game 3 against the Knicks, Pippen famously refused to enter the game after a timeout with 1.8 seconds left in regulation.  Pippen was upset that Bulls head coach Phil Jackson had drawn up the last shot for Toni Kukoc rather than Pippen.  Jackson, the greatest coach in professional basketball history, knew that Pippen was the greatest sidekick in basketball history.  He also knew that sidekicks don’t shoot daggers at the end of regulation in the playoffs.  Kukoc calmly stepped onto the court and won the game, defeating the Knicks, but more importantly, effectively emasculating Pippen.  With their best player unmasked as a chump, the Bulls bowed out to the Knicks.  And while Pippen had been disgraced, he had remained true to his subordination to Jordan’s greatness.  No further punishment would be necessary, and Pippen was allowed to remain Jordan’s sidekick as they later cruised to three more championships.      

The Knicks, and Starks, marched into the NBA Finals in June of 1994 where they would face the Houston Rockets.  On the surface, the Finals were a clash between the NBA’s two best big men, Ewing and the Rockets’ Hakeem Olajuwon, who had previously clashed as college players for the NCAA championship.  But, just as in the collegiate final in 1984, this matchup would disappoint.  It’s just not exciting to watch two seven-footers grind against one another two feet from the hoop.  Of course, the real tension of this series was what fate held in store for John Starks.  In order to maximize Starks’ moment of judgment, the Finals went to a rare Game 7, guaranteeing the greatest possible audience for what was to come.  But along the way to that Game 7, a funny thing happened.  The NBC broadcast of Game 5 was hijacked by O.J. Simpson and his white Ford Bronco.  As O.J. and his hostage cruised slowly down the Los Angeles freeway, pursued by 13 police cars and several LAPD helicopters, the NBA Finals had been subsumed in what NBC commentator Bob Costas described as the “surreal”.  This surreal intrusion of primordial chaos in the person of O. J. Simpson foreshadowed the supporting role that Game 7 was to play for a subtler, more fascinating intrusion.   

In Game 7, the symbolic order would extract its pound of flesh from John Starks, who had performed admirably up to this point in the Finals.  With the NBA championship on the line, and with anyone in the world who gave a damn about the game of basketball watching, John Starks had not just the worst night of his career, he had one of the worst nights anyone has ever had on a basketball court, and it could not have come on a bigger stage.  The numbers, while miserable, Starks shot 2 of 18 from the field, and a “perfect” 0 for 11 from the three-point line, don’t even begin to tell the story of how badly things went for Starks.  Because, after he started missing threes, rather than adjust and drive to the hoop for an easy look or a pass to the open man, he just kept shooting, and missing, threes.  Every time it looked like the Knicks might catch up to the Rockets, Starks jacked, and missed, another three.  It was as if someone (or something) outside of Starks were controlling his body, which we now know to be true.

But Starks was not the only one under the control of outside forces that night in Houston.  Knicks Coach Pat Riley, who, along with Phil Jackson and Red Auerbach forms the Three Tenors, if you will, of professional basketball coaches, inexplicably kept Starks in the game.  While Riley’s bench was thin, at some point after another Starks brick in the fourth quarter any of the twenty thousand people in the building would have been an improvement over Starks.  Everyone on the planet watching Game 7 knew that Starks needed to be taken out of that game.  Everyone, that is, except Starks and Riley, who were complicit that night in their (unconscious) service of the symbolic order as they perpetrated the required symbolic death of John Starks.  Years later, in a candid moment during the 2006 NBA Finals, Riley called his handling of Starks in 1993’s Game 7 the biggest coaching mistake of his career, adding that he has never forgiven himself.  Riley has yet to comprehend that he had no choice in the matter.  For, just as Judas’ shortcomings were instrumental in Jesus’ journey towards crucifixion and resurrection, John Starks’ inability to hit the broad side of a barn in Game 7, with a big assist from Coach Riley, was the turning point that restored the symbolic order of the professional basketball universe, enabling the return of the king, his Airness, one short year later.

As a postscript to this story, it is important to note the sad case of Nick Anderson.  Anderson was one of the most promising young players in the NBA when his Orlando Magic faced the Chicago Bulls in the 1995 NBA playoffs, just days after Jordan’s return to basketball.  Trailing the Magic as regulation waned, the Bulls of course handed the ball over to Jordan, fresh off his almost two year exodus from basketball.  In a blink Anderson made his fatal mistake, stealing the ball with shocking ease right out of Jordan’s previously unassailable iron grip, and stealing the series in the process, as the young and talented Magic hurtled towards the NBA Finals.  The symbolic order had been violated, yet again.  Retribution would be swift.  In Game 1 of the NBA Finals, once again featuring those Houston Rockets, Anderson would have four opportunities in the game’s closing seconds to ice the game away at the foul line.  Anderson missed all four, and the Rockets won the game and, eventually, the championship (making the Rockets the ultimate paperweight, as their superstar Olajuwon was just good enough to keep the NBA from floating away during Jordan’s exile).  His own symbolic death accomplished, for all intents and purposes, Nick Anderson was never heard from again. 

There is a lesson in all of this, and it comes dangerously close to “know your place and stick to it”.  But I’d like to believe that John Starks was a modern day Icarus.  When he soared to the rim and dunked over Horace Grant in the vicinity of Michael Jordan, he just got a little too close to the sun.  And though you can’t look directly at the sun, you just might want to take a peak before liftoff.  Just ask John Starks’ ghost.