During a dazzling two-decade career, encompassing two Olympic golds and six NBA championships, the basketball legend nicknamed His Airness was far too busy flying high and amassing earnings in excess of US$90 million (Dh330.6m) to pay much attention to the day-to-day concerns of his fellow black Americans.
Unlike many equally high-profile contemporaries, Michael Jordan hasn’t used his fame to speak out on issues of race, or engage with political activism.
The contrast could not have been greater with the current crop of NBA stars, many of whom have spoken out over the past few weeks in support of the Black Lives Matter campaign.
So when, on Monday, Jordan declared he could “stay silent no longer”, speaking out on the wave of shootings of African-Americans and police officers, many in the black community were relieved Air Jordan had finally come down to earth. It was, as one commentator noted, “the most socially conscious statement he’s ever made publicly”.
The only problem was that, in an effort to offend nobody, in the eyes of some black activists, he landed flat-footedly on the fence.
As “a proud American … and a black man”, Jordan said, “I have been deeply troubled by the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement and angered by the cowardly and hateful targeting and killing of police officers.
“I can no longer stay silent. We need to find solutions that ensure people of colour receive fair and equal treatment and that police officers – who put their lives on the line every day to protect us all – are respected and supported.”
His billionaire solution? Two donations of $1m, one to the newly established Institute for Community-Police Relations and the other to the legal defence fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Unites States’ oldest civil rights law organisation.
The donations were "creditworthy and problematic", Roger Groves, the black director of business law at Florida Coastal School of Law, wrote in Forbes. If you "venture into [these] murky politically shark-infested waters and your business depends on a broad swath of the American public", he added, then "you better have a balanced approach that minimises the alienation of affections of the fan base. Otherwise your revenues may suffer."
Harsher critics suggested that, like O J Simpson before him, fame and wealth had insulated the superstar from his own community. Rich celebrities such as Jordan were “clueless to the realities on the ground”, said Kofi Ademola of Black Lives Matter.
True. It’s tough to see the ground when you’re flying overhead in a private jet emblazoned with your own Air Jordan logo.
Michael Jeffrey Jordan was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 17, 1963, the fourth of five siblings. Fearing for their safety in the rough borough, his father, James, moved the family to Wilmington, North Carolina, while Jordan was a toddler.
His mother, Deloris, was a bank clerk; James was a forklift operator who became a supervisor at General Electric. They met, appropriately enough, after a basketball game in 1956.
Pushed by his elder brother, Larry, Jordan played basketball at high school. There, his will to succeed first surfaced, after he was cut from the school team.
“It was embarrassing,” Jordan later recalled. “I remember being really mad, too.”
He also got even. From then on, whenever he felt like giving up, “I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it”.
It was that determination, as a career appraisal by sports channel ESPN later put it, that drove his success. "Jordan made himself into a megastar. His burning desire to win, his utter refusal to quit … made him a legend."
His efforts were rewarded with a basketball scholarship to the University of North Carolina, and the investment paid off for the college when the Tar Heels team won the National Collegiate Athletic Association division one championship in 1982, beating Georgetown University thanks to a final basket from Jordan.
Crowned NCAA player of the year for the next two years, in the summer of 1984, Jordan won his first Olympic gold as a member of the US Olympic basketball team in Los Angeles. He collected another in Barcelona in 1992.
But the world of pro basketball was beckoning. Jordan left college before his final year to join the 1984 NBA draft. A shooting guard, he was picked by the Chicago Bulls, though he returned to college in 1986 to complete his degree.
In December 1984, barely a month into his pro career, Jordan found himself on the cover of Sports Illustrated under a prophetic headline: "A star is born." A broken foot tripped up his second season, but when he returned to active service in 1986-87 he had one of the highest-scoring seasons in NBA history.
Jordan married Juanita Vanoy, a former model, in 1989. They had two sons and a daughter before a divorce in 2006 that reportedly cost Jordan $168m – then a record for a celebrity settlement. He married another model, Yvette Prieto, in 2013.
Debate among basketball fans about the greatest player rage on – Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and LeBron James can all stake a claim – but the NBA is in no doubt. “By acclamation,” it states, “as a phenomenal athlete with a unique combination of fundamental soundness, grace, speed, power, artistry, improvisational ability and an unquenchable competitive desire … Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time”.
Even Johnson once conceded: “There’s Michael Jordan,” he said, “then there’s the rest of us.”
Jordan’s career appeared to come to an end in October 1993, when he announced his retirement. On July 23 that year, his 56-year-old father was shot dead by two teenagers attempting to rob him in his car. Jordan said his heart was no longer in the game. To the surprise of many, however, he turned to minor-league baseball, playing for the Birmingham Barons and the Scottsdale Scorpions in 1994.
In April that year, he told The New York Times his baseball efforts were a tribute to his father, who loved the sport and played it with Jordan as a child.
A less rose-tinted glimpse of his relationship with his father came from Jordan’s sister Deloris in 2014. “It was Daddy’s declaration of his worthlessness that became the driving force that motivated him,” she recalled. “Each accomplishment was his battle cry for defeating my father’s negative opinions of him.”
Jordan never made Major League Baseball, and in March 1995, returned to the Bulls after issuing a succinct press release: “I’m back.”
He tried retiring again in 1999. This time it lasted until 2001, when he announced he was joining the Washington Wizards and donating his salary to relief efforts for the victims of September 11. His final NBA game was on April 16, 2003.
Basketball made Jordan $90m during his playing career, and his financial success continued as the owner of basketball team the Charlotte Hornets (formerly the Bobcats).
The icon has also successfully traded up his celebrity status to create a powerful, enduring commercial brand. Today, Jordan earns more each year than he did in his entire playing career, not least by fronting numerous campaigns for companies including Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, Gatorade, McDonald’s and Nike.
The first Nike Air Jordan shoe, bearing the “Jumpman” logo of a silhouetted Jordan in flight, was produced by Nike in 1984. During the past three decades, there have been 30 subsequent versions, earning Nike a reputed £2 billion (Dh9.71bn) a year. The most recent, the AJ XXXI, were unveiled last week. The $185 latest model will be released on September 3.
Thanks in part to the continuing appeal of these shoes, Jordan has become a billionaire – the 486th richest in the US and No 20 in Forbes's Celebrity 100. As of Wednesday, according to Forbes, he was worth $1.14 billion.
For some, the Air Jordan has come to symbolise his disconnect from the black community. “Urban children,” noted black news site RollingOut in 2011, “have been killing one another … since the 1980s” over “an exorbitantly priced shoe … endorsed by a man whom has never shown interest in his own community”.
"Another year, another round of brawls over Nike Air Jordans," The Huffington Post reported in 2013, and in March this year a gunfight in a Minnesota branch of Foot Locker about the new $200 Air Jordan 2 Retro "Wing It" shoes left two wounded.
Jordan bore “a lot of responsibility for these obscene snapshots of imbecility”, said RollingOut, “yet he has not uttered a single syllable to condemn the behaviour [or] lobbied to make his shoe prices more in line with the demographic”.
It was against this background that Jordan’s statement on Monday came as such a surprise, especially to the black community. Finally, perhaps, His Airness is living up to the lines written by a Nike advertising executive: “I am Jordan. It’s more than what I wear. It’s how I live.”
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