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 Jack…