He Leaves Freshness of Laurels

In the fall of 1966, Sandy Koufax, the greatest pitcher of his time, the Cy Young Award winner that year, suddenly announced his retirement from baseball.

The Dodgers were stunned. The league was stupefied. He had led the league in innings pitched, victories (27), complete games (27), shutouts (five), strikeouts (317) and earned-run average (1.73) that year. He was only 30.

The sporting press thought maybe he was punishing the Dodgers. He had had a bitter contract dispute with the team that spring and grudgingly won a battle for a $120,000 salary (laughable by today’s standards).

But Koufax told the assembled multitudes at his Beverly Hills news conference that the cortisone he had been taking for a sore left arm had resulted in his taking the mound hallucinating and he feared physical and mental damage if he continued taking it.

Still, the betting was, in some quarters, he would sit out a year, then announce his return. He never did.

In April of 1956, Rocky Marciano, then heavyweight champion of the world who had never lost a fight and had defended his title for the sixth time, abruptly announced his retirement. The fight mob almost dropped its cigars, but word seeped out that Rocky found himself tied to a contract with a manager (Al Weill) who, he suspected, had been cheating on him in the payoffs. Insiders believed Marciano quit because he didn’t want to make any more money for Weill and would return to the ring as soon as the contract ran out. He never did. Marciano was 32.

In 1981, the Swedish tennis star, Bjorn Borg, who had won Wimbledon a modern-record five times in a row and who had just won his sixth French Open and his 62nd tournament, suddenly announced his retirement from the game and gave the sports pages a new term: “burnout.”

He was all of 25. He did come back, 10 years later, older, slower, broke, wielding an outdated wooden racket and an outdated forehand to match. There is an axiom in the fight game, “They never come back.” Borg proved it.

Quitting when you’re ahead is not exactly an American tradition. More common is to keep going until you go home in a barrel or a Rolls. The truism, “They’ll have to tear the uniform off him” applies to most of our sports stars. Everyone wants to die, so to speak, with his boots on and his guns out.

But now, of all people, Michael Jordan joins the melancholy parade of superstars who quit when they didn’t have to and left a void as deep as a chasm in our otherwise wonderful world of sport.

It’s as if Babe Ruth quit the game the year he hit 60 home runs, Dempsey after the Willard fight. It’s Marciano, Borg or Koufax times two. Jordan transcended his sport the way few athletes have in history.

There is nothing wrong with him physically. As they say around a racetrack, he “doesn’t have a pimple on him.” He’s not hallucinating, his agent doesn’t owe him money. I’m sure his blood pressure is low, his IQ high, his pulse rate in the 60s and his temperature 98.6. He can do anything with a basketball but make it talk.

So, the big question is--Why?

I don’t know Jordan well. A few locker-side interviews in a group with 20 or 30 other ink-stained wretches and microphone wielders. With expansion, he and the Bulls only came here once a year (to each franchise).

But I always found him amiable, easy-smiling, obviously well-adjusted. He found nothing hard about basketball and he actually seemed to enjoy the postgame journalistic give-and-take. Not everyone does. Larry Bird, for instance, in his formative years (he outgrew it) seemed to sit there in lip-biting torture like a guy being interrogated in a kidnaping or a kid sliding into a dentist’s chair.

Some people can’t stand the limelight. Others revel in it. I put Jordan down as a guy who was comfortable with it.

We are a nation of hero-worshipers. We are a nation without royalty. So we substitute point guards, quarterbacks, cleanup hitters and pugilists for archdukes, earls, barons and counts. It is this national fetish that seems to be the undoing of our athletic hierarchy. It is this mania that prompted the poet to identify “success” as a “bitch goddess.” If a poet felt that way, think about a 53-point-a-night off guard.

Ruth handled it. Pete Rose handled it. So did Jackie Robinson, O.J. Simpson. Some even turned it to their advantage. Arnold Palmer used it to move his sport into equal status with the others. Magic Johnson made basketball prime time.

It is one of the paradoxes of our society. Americans seek celebrity so they can escape their anonymous existence. Then, they long for their lost anonymity, which they re-identify as “privacy.”

Charles Lindbergh flies the Atlantic, an act of unprecedented bravery, while the world watches with bated breath. Then, when he’s given ticker-tape parades, songs are being written about him, he is the most famous man in the world, he suddenly remembers he’s shy, a private person and wishes the world would go away.

I would have bet Jordan could cope. He seemed to have the temperament, the sense of humor, the sense of self to put it all in place. Now, he wants to ground Air Jordan. Put it in the hangar.

There are some wire stories in which he blames the media. That won’t wash. We don’t fly the Atlantic, we merely report on those who did. Others suggest he blames his notoriety for the terrible senseless tragedy of his father’s death. There is no evidence the homicidal sociopaths who killed Mr. Jordan had any idea who he was. They simply wanted his car.

Jordan wants to become a golf pro? Forget it. You can’t slam-dunk a putt. You won’t get $24 million a year in shoe endorsements missing cuts at, say, Hardee’s Golf Classic or the Kmart Greater Greensboro open.

What then are we to conclude? Jordan will be back on an NBA floor as soon as he misses enough seven-foot putts or skulls it in the water at Hilton Head? Does he simply need to learn all over again what it’s like to have someone say, “Michael Who?”

Ruth wept when baseball couldn’t find a spot for him because he couldn’t get around on the fastball anymore. George Foreman climbed back in a ring 13 years after he lost his heavyweight championship to Muhammad Ali. Joe Louis had to be picked up off the floor and carried sadly to his corner unconscious before he could be talked into hanging them up. Nolan Ryan thought he had one more no-hitter in him when he was 45.

Is Jordan cheating us by not letting us see him slowed, confused, unable to leap tall buildings, turning over, missing layups, getting called for traveling? Shouldn’t he wait for that? Challenge that?

Dylan Thomas warned, “Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at close of day . . . “

But A. E. Housman had a different counsel:

“Smart lad to slip betimes away

“From fields where glory does not stay

“And early though the laurel grows

“It withers quicker than the rose.”

* BARKLEY COLLAPSES: A lower-back problem is believed to cause the all-star forward to fall while running wind sprints. He stays on the floor for 30 minutes. C15