Michael Jordan: Color Him Greene : HANG TIME: Days and Dreams With Michael Jordan, <i> By Bob Greene (Doubleday: $22.50; 406 pp.)</i>

Call me old-fashioned, but when I see a picture of Michael Jordan on the dust jacket of a book, even a picture of him with his chin practically resting on the author’s toupee, I expect the book to be about Michael Jordan.

That’s not asking too much, is it? After all, the man is the single greatest talent ever to play basketball, he has made Air Jordans an international sartorial statement, and he has written checks to lowlifes who were later terminated with extreme prejudice. Throw in his apparent penchant for never seeing a sickly child he didn’t treat like royalty, and you have a complex, potentially fascinating character. You have the humble lad who got cut from his high school team and grew up to lead the Chicago Bulls to two straight National Basketball Assn. championships. And the unbroken stallion who declined an audience with President Bush in the White House. And the loner who regards his own team as “a whispering little gossip factory.”

But first a few words about Bob Greene. He’s the guy with Jordan on the dust jacket of “Hang Time,” the writer whose disconcerting rug actually makes him the focal point of the picture for a nanosecond. The posing doesn’t end there, though. To lay the foundation for his book--and his is definitely the operative pronoun in this case--Greene passes himself off as a world-weary newspaper columnist choking on too many tales of battered kids, drugged-up mothers and every other urban horror. He had been so busy wading through the morass, he writes, that he had never seen the Bulls play in person until he took one of society’s victims, a 9-year-old boy, to a game. The kid got to sit next to Jordan on the Bulls’ bench, and when Greene said thanks afterward, Jordan told him not to be a stranger. Greene knew an invitation from on high when he heard one.

He would have readers believe that Jordan unknowingly offered him a chance to salve his battered sensibilities, an opportunity to find shelter from life’s storms in both the roar of the crowd and the undisturbed pre-game calm of Chicago Stadium. Nothing “low-spirited and mean and shoddy and common” there; nothing “wretched,” either. Greene was in wonderland: “It was like nothing I had ever seen in my life, and it was changing the way I looked at the world, and each day before the sun went down I headed off to witness it anew.”

Pardon the cynicism, but I think that’s a shuck. What Green really saw in Michael Jordan was a book--one that wouldn’t require much work, one that could get a trial run in his Chicago Tribune column, one that could cash in on the country’s reigning sports phenomenon. Not exactly high-minded, yet nothing that newspaper guys haven’t done before, and will do again. And if opportunism were all Greene is guilty of, he would get a pass on “Hang Time.” But like a flasher who can’t resist temptation, Greene just has to go farther. He pretends to be something he isn’t and winds up revealing that he is nothing close to what he could have been.

Two decades ago, nobody under 30 in American newspapers was hotter than Greene. He had read the Gospel according to Jimmy Breslin and put it to use faster and better than any of the rest of us who worshiped at Breslin’s battered Smith-Corona. The proof was everywhere--a general column in the Chicago Sun-Times, magazine gigs in New Times and Rolling Stone, and books, not just anthologies, but honest-to-God hardcover chronicles of an Alice Cooper tour and the 1972 presidential campaign.

Most of the time, Greene played the innocent in print, but every once in a while, he would sink his teeth into some villain’s hindquarters. A friend recalls, for example, how Greene responded to one of Richard Nixon’s outrageous whoppers by writing a column that consisted of a single sentence: “And an eggplant wears earmuffs.” Never mind that his editors blew a collective gasket. Greene had something that is now just a dim memory.

It wasn’t the first time the grind of column-writing dried up somebody’s juices, but the great ones--the Breslins, the Roykos, the Kemptons, the Hamills--possess the strength to survive and prosper. Rather than take his place among them, Greene hopped aboard an express train to mediocrity. His 1984 book about the birth of his daughter, “Good Morning, Merry Sunshine,” made me want to fwow up, and his newspaper column usually tackles no tougher subjects than Elvis Presley, diet chocolate soda and the wacky things travelers find in their hotel rooms. Even if he weren’t working on the same paper as Mike Royko, he would still come across as a journalistic eunuch.

And yet Greene has the unmitigated gall to suggest that he was weary of being Chicago’s social conscience when he turned to Jordan for escape. It’s as if he believes this charade will excuse his shameless sucking up, his softball questions, his unwillingness to delve into the backwaters of his subject’s psyche. Why dig beneath the Howard Hughes qualities of Jordan’s life as a cultural icon when you can include a sprightly conversation with a cabby about overpaid athletes? That would have required real work, and real work would have meant that “Hang Time” wasn’t out in time for Christmas.

So it is left for someone else to write a book about Michael Jordan that counts for more than an easy payday. But Bob Greene can run to the bank confident that he is still the master of his specialty--faking it.