This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between. Please join the mailing list and share, on social media or through e-mail or however you feel comfortable sharing. (It’s still FREE to join the list for now: Just click “None” on the “subscribe now” page.) If you like what you read, please spread the word, or consider chipping in and allowing me the time to do a little more research on on these posts. You’ll get full access to the archive of more than 100 previous posts, as well.
I.
Let us begin today with eight minutes of Michael Jordan doing Michael Jordan things:
There is no obligation to watch all eight minutes of this video in order to consume the remainder of this newsletter. In fact, you actually don’t need to watch any of it (although it really is quite beautiful), because I can summarize the premise of this video in one sentence: It is literally clip after clip of Jordan finishing balletic and curvaceous drives to the basket with his off-hand, his left.
Until last week, Michael Jordan’s ability to score points with his left hand may not have been something you ever really contemplated; I certainly had not, until I read the writer Ethan Strauss’s post about how Jordan’s lack of a left hand had apparently became the subject of the most recent nonsensical argument on a wildly popular video app that is most likely being utilized as a tool of an authoritarian government. This, in turn, led to a meme: We Done With the 90s, which essentially used Michael Jordan, of all people, in order to slough off an entire decade as culturally irrelevant.
Now, in terms of utterly idiotic American arguments, the claim that Michael Jordan was, in fact, always secretly washed ranks quite low on the list. (It is like declaring that Jesus was somehow overrated because he could not transform water into Chateux Lafite Rothschild.) And if you want to read about the basketball-related reasons that this meme may have taken hold, I point you to Strauss’s post about the sheer absurdity of the whole Jordan-LeBron GOAT debate and how nostalgia and recency bias colors our judgment. “Attacking the past as different and worse works because, honestly, there’s something to it,” Strauss writes.
But I kind of think it doesn’t stop with basketball. I think it says something about the way certain young people are now oddly dismissive of history.
II.
You might say this all began in roughly 2019, when the term “O.K. Boomer” swept through the Internet. It was, like most memes, incredibly reductive and stupid, the “I Know You Are But What am I” of its age, but it happened for a reason; it happened because fed-up young people felt as if their concerns were largely being ignored by the generation that came before—the ones who created these problems in the first place. And even as the meme wore out, its sentiment remained: Young people were fed up with older people, opening up the kind of cultural generation gap that hadn’t existed since the 1960s.
And now, a few years later, they are coming for Michael Jordan.
For those of us who belong to the awkward middle-child iteration of 20th-century history known as Generation X, questioning the brilliance of Michael Jordan makes as much sense as disregarding the mind-blowing energy of Nirvana’s Nevermind. We were there. We saw it. We absolutely know that what you’re telling us makes no fucking sense. (We also realize that you’re probably just trolling us, because, unlike Boomers, we’re the ones who invented trolling.) But there’s a reason why young people might choose to screw around with us in this particular way, and I think it’s because they’re jealous.
Here is a real-life opening of a newspaper column written by a grumpy older man in 1994:
This was the issue with The Nineties: We were afforded the luxury of being so ignorant and apathetic that we didn’t even bother to take off our ironic hats. The Nineties, as the author Chuck Klosterman wrote, were “perhaps the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional…It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive.”
In a way, Jordan was the embodiment of that: He had the freedom to be entirely apolitical throughout his career, and to focus entirely on his own (often petty and self-centered) view of the world.1 And at the time, we celebrated him for it.
III.
You cannot say the same of LeBron James—whether by choice or by obligation, he developed a political voice in an era where it was essentially demanded of him. He couldn’t just be a basketball player; he had to speak up.
It is an exhausting era in which to be a young person; you feel like you have to do something, even as you feel powerless. It’s easy to give in to helplessness, and to presume that everyone who came before you is to blame for all the problems in the world, which is not entirely wrong.
The danger in this is that there is a fine line between vexation at history and complete disregard of history, just as there is a difference between trolling Michael Jordan and becoming a Michael Jordan Truther. There is a difference between disputing broad interpretations of history, and questioning long-held conclusions, and being angry about the hand your generation has been dealt, and working to change assumptions…there is a difference between that, and refusing to believe in history altogether.
Michael Jordan had a left hand. It was real, and it was spectacular. You can’t just ignore what was empirically true. That’s the thing about history: Once you attack the past and then triumphantly declare that it never happened in the first place, you’re pretty much doomed.
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For more on the surprisingly complexity of Jordan’s cultural presence in his era, I point you to Johnny Smith’s book Jumpman: The Making and Meaning of Michael Jordan.
awkward middle-child iteration of 20th-century history known as Generation X. lol
I cackled at the water-to-wine TikTok reference.