re: TulaneLSU's review of Air and TulaneLSU's Top 10 Air Jordans of all-time

To cut to the chase, Cousin convinced me. We quickly finished our brunch and rushed to a theater in Morrisville, NC three hours away. We caught our evening flight from Raleigh and arrived at the family house east of Destin just a short while ago.

Some of you may find this hard to believe, but I was a Michael Jordan fan when I was a youngster. Jordan’s rise to supremacy coincided with America’s global supremacy. Rocky had defeated Drago. America was the undisputed champ of the world. Father was driving one of his famous emerald green Jaguars, which I think he bought from Stephen’s Imports on St. Charles. Our Prytania house was filled with love and laughter. Movies like Beverly Hills Cop and Karate Kid and shows like Fresh Prince gave the illusion of racial harmony. Times seemed pretty good in the Jordanian Era of America, at least for a rich kid.

One of the principle symbols of that golden era was the Nike Air Jordan. The shoe, however, plays a secondary part in the film. The film’s primary form consists of the relationship between Sonny and mother, Michael’s mother. Can the gambling salesman pitch mother and win her?

I have to hand it to director actor Ben Affleck. He does a masterful job telling the story in a quite surprising way. He paints Nike as a fledgling outsider, and at times, he fools the audience into cheering for Nike as the noble oppressed, the underdog. That in itself is quite an achievement. Even more, he was able to manipulate me into pulling for two less than savory characters: a compulsive gambler, Vacarro, who leached from the success of kids, and a vain Buddhist wannabe who got rich from the sweatshop labor, Knight. Turning questionable characters into underdog heroes is no easy task.

Their ultimate goal is not to help Michael Jordan but to make money off him. And their method is to deify Jordan. The shoe bearing his name is to be a modern day sacrament or relic, something that physically connects his adoring followers to him, something through which they can receive his greatness (or grace). “A shoe is just a shoe, until my son steps in it,” says Michael’s mother.

America’s slide into cultural atheism began in the 80s, so it was prescient of Nike to give the public a new deity in a gifted athlete like Jordan. Jesus never dunked or hit a buzzer winning shot in a championship game. But Jordan did. And for those whose lives are vested in sports, those trifling things mean more than salvation from sin. They mean salvation from the asthete’s worst enemy: boredom. So those who save us from that boredom, those entertainers, become our gods and saviors. Jordan succumbed to this praise and several years into his professional career, he was happy to push that narrative, telling opponents to whom he trash talked, “Call me black Jesus.”

The movie’s climatic scene is Sonny’s pitch to Michael and his mother. Sonny begins to speak off the cuff, just like MLK Jr. did in his “I Have a Dream” speech, according to what Marlon Wayan’s character told Sonny earlier in the movie. In that speech, Sonny appeals to Jordan’s vanity, saying something to the effect of “no one at this table will be remembered after we die. But you, Mike, will always be remembered because of your greatness.”

Once the goosebumps of the impassioned speech wore away, the absurdity of such a statement set in. We call athletes today transcendent, but how many athletes are truly transcendent? After all, who today remembers Donald Dinnie?

Worse yet, how dangerous it is to ascribe to creation that which belongs only to the Eternal. To follow a false and flawed light rather than the light of life is perdition. We are not meant to “be like Mike,” as another corporate giant told us. Neither Jordan nor any man is the prototype. His life is not beautiful, perfect, or pure. He may have moved gracefully through the air for a decade or two, but his heart is not one of pure grace. His life is not one of virtue, pure love, and self-sacrifice. Jesus, on the other hand, is our source of eternal salvation, as he was made perfect and showed us true transcendence and perfection.