|
An Open Letter to MJ Dear Michael, Thanks for the memories, but we both know you’re not any more done playing ball than Donald Rumsfeld is done overthrowing rogue states. So far, retiring has been a ten year process. Do I hear fifteen? The first time you retired, there was no Amazon.com, no AOL, no Viagra, and no Arizona Diamondbacks. Shaq was missing free-throws at Louisiana. George W. Bush had just put down his last drink. Colin Farrell had just picked up his first one. Michael Jackson still had some nasal cartilage left. Nixon was making a comeback. Bill and Hillary still occasionally did it. Cell phones looked like walkie-talkies and were used primarily by drug dealers and inside traders. OJ was well liked. The first time you stepped away from the game was a “retirement” only in the sense that you went down to Florida to catch some exhibition games. And in the sense that you often got the same number of hits as the eighty-three-year old guys in the stands named Morty. But then the baseball strike came, and you figured if you were going to be a replacement player, it might as well be back in the NBA. You then proceeded to win as many championships after retiring as before, becoming the Jimmy Carter of professional sports. I recall the ’98 all-star game at the Garden, where all the sportswriters said you were passing the baton to Kobe. Turns out you were passing it to yourself. Your second retirement stuck like Darryl Strawberry’s twelve-step program. Though some folks made derogatory remarks about your third NBA stint, going from being the best player in the league to the eleventh best is not what I call an embarrassment. You added almost 300 points to the Washington Wizard’s win percentage. The key is next time to start with a team winning at least 35 percent of its games. Right about now, you could have been putting the Milwaukee Bucks over the top. You were the guttiest player in the history of the playoffs, and even though you’re spending this postseason looking for a front office job, you showed us a different kind of courage in ‘03. By playing out the string while your lifetime scoring average record was in jeopardy, you sort of did a Ted Williams, a la 1941. But the only thing frozen about MJ is that still shot of you airborne after beating Utah in the ’98 finals. By averaging better than twenty points a game on bad knees in the final two weeks of 2003, you hung on to that record like Republicans in a recount. Cry not for Wilt Chamberlain. His most-groupies-bedded record is still intact, Magic Johnson and Gene Simmons notwithstanding. But Michael, you’re coming back anyway, and you won’t care about losing the record altogether. We found an asterisk for Babe Ruth, and we’ll find one for you. Beating Charles Barkley in golf will get boring, just like it did last time. But there are deeper reasons. The first time you came out of retirement, it was so your sons could see you play. The third time, it’ll be to play against your sons. I know you. When other folks start accepting your retirement, you will stop. Maybe it comes down to this: There are two things that make someone want to come back—watching people play the game well and watching people play the game poorly. There will be plenty of both. Perhaps I speak out of turn. The only thing I can jam is a lawnmower . But I have two words for you: Jerry Rice. Two more: Roger Clemens. Granted, you don’t want to wind up like Ricky Henderson, going one for four at age 44 against teams with names like the Bridgeport Bluefish. But it’s coming. Not only do we want to be like Mike. You want to be like Mike. Your 2005 calendar looks open to me. Rumors will fly. Footage of your workouts and one-on-one games with college seniors will surface on ESPN. There will be denials and equivocations. There will be genuine playoff contending teams coached by Phil Jackson needing help down the stretch and other offers to be a player-coach. You have already been a player- coach for a long time. Now it’ll be official, and you’ll get paid for it. And as we know, player-coaches are a good thing in that they reduce the statistical chances of a player/coach choking incident. Laugh now, but time is on my side. Each year closer that first AARP mailing draws is another brick in the ultimate challenge, and you could never turn away a challenge for too long. Science, too, is on my side. Just last month, geneticists identified the DNA molecule that causes premature aging. How far away can they be from the declining jump shot gene? Remember, in America, all aging is premature. Today’s forty is yesterday’s thirty. Tomorrow’s fifty is yesterday’s thirty-five. And as Frank Sinatra once said, thirty-five was a very good year. Click here to rant back. |