Michael Jordan and the birth of a new era
Rambo, Reagan, Air Jordans, and the invention of an icon
Welcome to Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by Michael Weinreb about sports history, culture and politics.
A little more than a decade ago, I began toying with an idea: A non-fiction book set in the mid-1980s, at the height of the Reagan years, when sports graduated into an unprecedented era. This was the moment that Bo Jackson emerged as a two-sport star and propelled Nike into the stratosphere of sports marketing; this was the moment when Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose in the days before the NBA draft, sparking a movement in Congress to pass draconian drug laws whose impacts still linger today; this was the moment when the 1985 Bears and their quarterback, Jim McMahon, defied our tidy notions of what a Super Bowl-winning team was supposed to look like and act like.
Obviously, I could not write this book without exploring the rise of Michael Jordan, who always felt far more interesting to me as a proxy for the emergence of that new era than as an actual personality. If Bo Jackson—whose Just Do It-fueled fame actually eclipsed Jordan’s in the late 80s—was a Bunyan-esque figure who produced spontaneous moments of joy, Jordan was far more circumspect (especially in those early years). Even the interesting things he did felt calculated; nothing about him ever felt as if it hadn’t been subject to a meticulous profit and loss calculation.
This is an excerpt from that book, which was called Bigger Than the Game. Over the course of time, the work I did for it became—both directly and indirectly—the subject of several 30 for 30 documentaries, which may be one of many reasons why it didn’t exactly fly off the shelves. I suppose I published a book about a previous era in sports and culture on the precipice of an entirely new era in sports and culture. But since Michael Jordan is suddenly the source of our collective cultural fascination in the midst of yet another moment of unprecedented societal change, I figured I’d re-publish this excerpt, which gets at how Jordan took his first steps toward becoming larger-than-life cultural figure.
The first pair of shoes were hastily designed red-and-black monstrosities, infused with a small and largely useless pocket of air, audacious and impractical and utterly prescient in their garishness. In the brief and occasionally sordid history of the industry known as sports marketing, there is a before and after, and those sneakers mark the demarcation between the archaic and the contemporary, between black-and-white and living color. They debuted in the fall of 1984 on the feet of a rookie guard for the NBA’s Chicago Bulls, and they burst through the monochrome and largely white-canvas tradition of NBA footwear manufactured by shoe giants like Converse, who paid Larry Bird and Magic Johnson approximately seventy thousand dollars per year to wear their shoes. It was nothing new, the notion of athletes getting paid to promote a certain brand of shoe. But an athlete promoting these shoes, for this kind of money—that was what got people’s attention.
The shoes so perplexed the management of the National Basketball Association that the league threatened to fine the wearer—Michael Jordan, twenty-two, originally of Wilmington, North Carolina—if he took the court in them, because they didn’t match the red-and-white color scheme of the Chicago Bulls. Jordan wore them anyway, in his second game as a pro, and Nike paid his thousand-dollar fine, then ran ads touting the subversiveness of their product: “On September 15, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe. On October 18, the NBA threw them out of the game. Fortunately, the NBA can’t keep you from wearing them. Air Jordans. For Nike.”
It was the counterculture gone to market; it would become a defining advertising trend in the era of Rambo and Rocky and Reagan, in the age of the socially acceptable antihero, amid the rise of the teenage wasteland known as MTV. We don’t need people to tell us what to do; we should wear what we want to wear (the irony being that Nike was telling us exactly what to wear). Which was funny, because there was absolutely nothing countercultural about Jordan himself: When first shown sketches of Nike’s red-and-black prototype, he said he couldn’t wear them because “those are the devil’s colors.” The NBA’s commissioner, David Stern, quietly approved Nike’s use of the ad—he found it amusing—and Jordan switched to a red-and-white shoe to comply with NBA regulations. But the image was what mattered. It was the sort of publicity coup Nike, Inc., had aimed for as it struggled to redefine itself amid the changing recreational culture of the mid-1980s, as it cut many of its endorsement contracts in order to focus on certain athletes, and on Jordan in particular. They believed in him because their people believed in him, because their scout, a man named Sonny Vaccaro, had promised he would stake his career on Jordan’s success.
Nike, Inc., based in Portland, Oregon, founded in the 1960s by former University of Oregon runner Philip Knight, had positioned itself as the very embodiment of entrepreneurial free-spiritedness, an institution whose employees saw it more like a religion than a corporation. Their people were brash and arrogant and insanely competitive, a reflection of their founder. The company had thrived amid the rise of the national jogging craze, its earnings rising at an average annual rate of nearly 100 percent between 1978 and 1983. But now Nike found itself rudderless, following the sudden death of jogging’s highest-profile promoter, Jim Fixx, who collapsed and suffered a massive coronary in the summer of ’84. Running shoes had given way to aerobics shoes and jazzercise shoes, to the increasingly sophisticated fitness routines of Jane Fonda and the cultural elite, and Reebok had beaten Nike to that market. Reebok’s shoes were soft and white, and Reebok’s shoes were selling to the masses, and what was Nike anymore except a lagging running-shoe company seeking an identity, the rebel gone to pasture?
In February of 1985, Nike would report a $2.1 million quarterly loss; they were scaling back, laying off workers, and they had mortgaged their future and their identity on the body of a single young man out of the University of North Carolina who defied the traditional demographics of an athletic-gear pitchman in several predominant ways. Most notably, two things: He played basketball, and he was black.
In the past, both had been red flags, and neither portended mass appeal. The presumptions of the 1950s still held true on Madison Avenue—team athletes couldn’t market themselves like, say, tennis players, and black athletes did not have the ability to break through to the suburban white market, or to appeal to great swaths of rural America. Late in 1984, Fortune magazine ridiculed the company for signing Jordan to a $2.5 million contract; it seemed like a desperate move by a desperate company that had lost its way. Asked by Fortune whether he might sell his share of the company, Knight said “we wouldn’t necessarily turn anything down.”
And yet the executives at Nike, along with Jordan’s agent, David Falk, saw something in Jordan. They saw a path to reach an untapped market, a conduit to urban youth, and to the rebirth of the company itself. Sneaker contracts were becoming an increasingly relevant factor in professional basketball—Falk’s own client, James Worthy, had recently signed an eight-year, $1.2 million deal with New Balance, raising the ante on the numbers—but Jordan’s pact was a breakthrough, because Falk and the management at Nike envisioned the transformation of Jordan into something more than merely a basketball player. They saw a way to reinvent the team-sport athlete as the centerpiece of a campaign, as a commercial icon. They envisioned Michael Jordan—soft-spoken, determined, and gifted with rare abilities and an electric smile—as a brand whose television appeal would carry over the masses.
All three parties needed each other; the relationship would be symbiotic, for Falk, for Jordan, for Nike itself. Jordan’s mere presence seemed to energize the creative minds at Nike, veterans of the company and creative specialists like Rob Strasser and Peter Moore, who saw Jordan as a palette on which to experiment with their own radical ideas. Nike didn’t just design shoes specifically for Jordan. They designed an entire clothing line: sweatpants, T-shirts, tank tops, all of these things that no one could have imagined a young basketball player—a young black basketball player—would have the ability to sell. Just as important, they fast-tracked it all, forming their own group outside the corporate bureaucracy so as to hurry their products to market, caution be damned. “I did think the black-and-red shoes were too far out there,” said Mike Caster, the first marketing manager for the Air Jordan line. “But I was just used to sneakers that were white. Those guys were brilliant. They were some of the best creative people I’ve ever worked with.”
What they recognized—both by accident and by design—was that times had changed. There was something nonthreatening about Jordan, about that smile, about his fantastical leaping ability , and it did not take much of a spark in this age of twenty-four-hour sports networks, amid the rise of a generation that was far too young to recall the struggles of the civil-rights movement, for his appeal to bridge the chasm between the inner city and the suburbs. “If Michael Jordan, he of the brilliant smile, was not burdened by race,” wrote author David Halberstam, “why should you be burdened by it either?
Supplemental reading:
Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made, by David Halberstam
Swoosh: The Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There, by J.B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund
This newsletter is very much a work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas? Contact me.