BACK FROM THE EDGE

Are you in there somewhere, Mike?

Jammed into a corner of the visitors’ dressing room in Cleveland’s Gund Arena, Michael Jordan looks into five minicams, speaks into 25 microphones and takes questions from a crowd of 50 press people who have compacted themselves into an anxious mass. The Bulls have just tied the Los Angeles Lakers’ record for victories in a season, but for Jordan, this is routine, give or take a few paparazzi, which is what his singular fame has turned the press into.

The people in the back of the pack can’t hear. They’re waiting for someone ahead of them to get tired or claustrophobic and leave. TV guys yell at the people up front to get their tape recorders down so they can see Jordan’s face; sometimes they nudge people to get them out of the shot. Fights are not unheard of. Curses are common.

In the center of the maelstrom, Jordan burbles away happily, breaking new grammatical ground as he goes and charming everyone in sight with his enthusiasm and his grin. He’s formally dressed, as usual, in a thousand-dollar suit from his deal with upscale Chicago haberdasher Bigsby & Kruthers; his tie is knotted perfectly, a diamond chip-studded hoop in his left ear. There are a few beads of sweat on the famous forehead. Your child may not know President Clinton or the Pope as well as he knows Jordan, a superstar not only in basketball, for whatever that’s worth, but in TV commercials, today’s arbiter and index of fame. For Jordan, fame and artistry are intertwined. Only a few athletes--Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali--ever dominated their games and transcended their sports as he does. Jordan, coming along during a commercial and communications explosion, or helping trigger it, may be the biggest there ever was.

Think of it: an entire world in thrall! A foreign journalist at the ’92 Olympics asking him, “Are you of this earth?” To which a bemused Jordan replied: “Well, I live in Chicago.”

Actually, he rules Chicago. The nation’s third-largest city is a Mike-ocracy, with fans staging candlelight vigils and leaving flowers at the base of his statue in front of the Bulls’ stadium.

His annual endorsement income is estimated at $40 million, and he expects to sign this summer a new playing contract for another $15-$20 million. Last spring, when reports circulated that he’d return to basketball, the stock of his five corporate partners gained $2.3 billion.

Yes, he ran away from basketball three seasons ago. He was a different Mike then: spent, tired of the spotlight and the intrusions. Fame comes in two sizes--too little or too much--and it’s never the way anyone thinks it will be.

“You think of all the good things about being famous,” Jordan says. “You know, the notoriety, the respect”--he grins--”the free dinners, the different types of amenities that come along with success.

“But, then again, you never really think about all the things that it hampers or puts strains on, from your lifestyle away from the basketball court, the expectations that people have for you, the way that you’re either supposed to live or expected to live, the way that they feel they have a piece of you, no matter what, because of their respect and adulation toward you.”

So he tried something else--baseball? He had other ambitions as absurd--the pro golf tour? But he learned something: He couldn’t do anything he wanted to. He wasn’t a god, just a basketball player who missed it.

Now he’s reconquering the game, trying to deal with the demands of fame, strains on his lifestyle and the people who think they have a piece of him, etc. When he left, it was as if a dark cloud fell over the NBA, but now it’s Camelot again with TV ratings bursting out all over. Jordan is happier than he’s ever been, finally a megastar at peace with himself.

The staffer has been instructed to rescue Jordan after 20 minutes or so, or he could be there an hour. Michael answers a few more questions and leaves, escorted by an off-duty Chicago cop who acts as aide and bodyguard. When the playoffs come and the real craziness starts, Jordan may use up to six bodyguards--or as the New York Daily News’ Mitch Lawrence suggested, “Four to carry the litter, two to scatter the rose petals.”

“Michael!” yells a Bulls staffer behind the press pack, “we gotta go!” If you were looking out at the world Michael Jordan sees, you might want extra security, too. It’s not simple, this fame.

*

There was a crow walking on his career. it was Dec. 17, 1991, an ordinary game on the Bulls schedule--Chicago Stadium, 7:35 p.m. against the Lakers--that turned into something else: a look through time into Jordan’s future.

Six months after winning his first NBA championship, the one he thought would change everything, his life had become more complicated than ever. It wasn’t a victory parade but an ongoing controversy.

A best-selling book, “The Jordan Rules,” suggested he wasn’t really a Boy Scout, and his life seemed like living confirmation. He had passed up the Bulls’ trip to the White House to meet President. George Bush--as if he needed to do a free political commercial--and was criticized by the press and ripped by teammate Horace Grant for demanding special treatment. Jordan said he was vacationing with his family in Hilton Head, S.C., but he was also playing high-stakes golf and poker with friends. How could he know that some of them had police records, including one Slim Bouler, a convicted drug dealer who wound up with Jordan’s check for $57,000?

Magic Johnson, who had recently retired after learning that he was HIV positive, was on this trip with the Lakers. Sports Illustrated, which was naming Jordan its athlete of the year, would honor him in a pregame ceremony. In that day’s papers, a U.S. attorney said he wanted to know more about Jordan’s check to Bouler.

The ceremony was held in a dank hallway in the catacombs under the old Chicago Stadium stands, a setting appropriate to Jordan’s mood. A man practiced in saying the right thing, he couldn’t hide his blues. “It’s been a very good and bad month for me,” he said, managing a little grin. “I’ve gone from un-American and a tyrant to sportsman of the year.”

In a crowning irony, Johnson, the man with the death sentence hanging over his head, then took the podium . . . to cheer up Jordan, the man who had everything, even pleading with the press at one point to stop hounding the Bulls’ star.

“You’re going to make him leave the game earlier than he wants to,” Johnson said. “Mark my words. He doesn’t need the money . . . . And then you’ll never see another one like him.”

Jordan then came apart in the game. In the second half, when he was accustomed to taking over and waving the mortals on both teams aside like servants in a well-run household, he missed 10 consecutive shots. Once he stole the ball and went in for the kind of dunk that lit up highlight shows, double-clutched in the air to heighten the effect--and missed.

It would be another two years before he would spring his surprise retirement, but people who were there that night could see something weird coming.

“At that time,” says Johnson now, “Michael wasn’t enjoying himself anymore. See what happened, Larry [Bird, who was in his last season] and I left and we left him. He’s the one sitting there. Now it’s just him.

“Then, wham! Wham! Every move--’Oh, Michael’s in Atlantic City!’ Everything got magnified, whatever he did, I’m talking about wherever he went. It was bigger than life.

“So now what happened, Michael set in. He was introverted because of all the attention. The league turned to Michael. Remember, our young guys hadn’t arrived yet, so it was just Michael. There was no Grant Hill, was no Shaquille O’Neal. It was Michael . . . Jordan . . . . That’s it.

“I was watching him and he wasn’t enjoying it. See, the Michael I used to see, you know--’MJ, come and play cards tonight’--that was the first time he hadn’t invited me over to play cards. And I could see it really getting on him. He was running out now. He was ducking. It wasn’t Michael. Michael didn’t used to do that. I said, ‘Oh-oh.’

“And I told everybody. I said, you’re going to run him out. I told the guys at NBC after that, Michael’s going to retire in a year. They didn’t believe me. Sure enough, Michael retired.

“See, Michael wants to play basketball, but he’d rather not deal with the other things. Why does he play golf? To get away from the world. Why does he play 36 holes, 42 holes? Michael will go from 7 until the sun goes down in the summer. He doesn’t come off the golf course. He stays all . . . day . . . and . . . night.

“Why? Because he’s out there, nobody can bother him. He’s having fun. The world is like shut out.”

*

It has been a long time since reality fit the image but once Jordan really was the boy next door.

He grew up in small-town Wilmington, N.C., one of five children of James and Deloris Jordan. Both parents held middle-level management jobs, James with General Electric, Deloris at a bank. Michael, youngest of the three boys, was the outgoing, rambunctious one, always testing his parents or challenging his brothers and sisters at whatever they did best--such as when he and Larry, who was a year older, took up basketball.

James tried to compliment both equally, even though Michael had all the natural aptitude and wasn’t in it for parity.

“As I started to grow,” he says, “my father always would give more confidence to Larry, because I was taller and a lot of things came easier to me. So [my father] felt like he could balance it by giving [Larry] more of a compliment. If I scored 25 points and Larry had two steals, somehow [my father] would make it even.

“That made me think, shoot, I had to prove myself even greater, 25 points ain’t enough to get the accolades of your father, if you get two steals, that seems to be enough for him. It became a challenge for my father’s admiration or my mother’s admiration . . . .

“Even now, I mean, it doesn’t change.” It, of course, was the process by which Jordan sought to win approval. But from all accounts, including his own, he didn’t have to perform for his parents, who were supportive of their children. James was often around the Bulls, and the beat writers liked him. Outgoing and chirpy, the father didn’t look like an ogre who tyrannized his son; they were friends who hung out together after Michael grew up. If the son developed a ravenous desire for domination, it looks like it was his choice. He just liked to compete.

Michael Jordan was like a lot of teenagers. He said later that he thought his elfin ears looked funny. He despaired of finding a woman who’d want to marry him, and he took home-economics courses because he thought he’d need to look after himself.

He went out for basketball because he thought being on the team would make him look cool. His best friend was on the team. Larry made it. But Michael didn’t and was more than just a little disappointed.

“I was devastated,” Jordan says, “because I figured, from an ego standpoint, who wouldn’t like to be in high school as a sophomore trying to play on a varsity team?

“I mean, it’s like you want to put your head underneath your pillow, and you don’t want to go to school.”

Listening to Jordan, one gets the impression his ascent was slow and tortured, which suggests how impatient he was, how harrowing every step was for him. Actually, he went up like a rocket.

He made the team as a junior. After his senior year, he played in the prestigious McDonald’s All-Star Game, one of the top 33 preps in the nation. He says his little town had never sent a player into big-time college ball--”Couple of them went to Appalachian State or Lamar University or Winston-Salem State, but no one went to North Carolina, N.C. State, UCLA. I wanted to be the first.” He got a scholarship to mighty UNC. Few freshmen started for Dean Smith, but Jordan did, making the famous 15-foot jump shot in the closing seconds of the 1982 NCAA finals to beat Georgetown. Bobby Knight, Jordan’s Olympic coach in 1984 and a man who rarely acknowledged being impressed, called Michael the best he had ever seen. (Typically, Knight didn’t say it until years later and, of course, never hinted it to Jordan.)

Restrained by Smith’s system, which demanded that great players fit into a machine, Jordan burst upon an unprepared NBA in 1984. No one knew what to expect. Jordan was drafted third, behind not only the great Hakeem Olajuwon of the University of Houston but a lesser prospect who happened to be tall: Kentucky’s Sam Bowie.

Nevertheless, something new was afoot. In an age in which even white athletes were of little moment commercially, Jordan signed a $500,000-a-year deal in 1984 with Nike, a then-struggling little company outside Portland, Ore., that promised to put out an entire Jordan line of leisure wear. The deal was unprecedented--and even controversial within the company. Sonny Vacarro, Nike’s college basketball expert, pushed it, but he says he was asked by Howard Slusher, a lawyer and player agent on the board of directors, “Will you bet your job on it?” Vacarro, gulping, said he would. Nike went ahead and was criticized in the trade press for lavishing riches on an untested rookie.

“The irony was, I didn’t know Michael,” says Vacarro, now living in Santa Monica and working for Adidas. “But he had the rarest of things--he had that ability to transcend basketball.

“I watched the game where he beat Georgetown. I watched so many other highlight games in college in which he was almost contained by Dean Smith, but you sensed something was going to happen.

“And he had a good, healthy look. He was the right story. I don’t know, I don’t profess to know inner things here, but I guessed right.”

*

It was true: Jordan was not only gifted but . . . there’s no other word for it . . . beautiful.

It was as if the forces of nature had converged to produce a megastar of a proportion the world had never seen--Jordan’s look, his extraordinary grace, the rise of the NBA led by Johnson’s Lakers and Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics, a preeminent place in the sneaker boom that pumped in millions of promotional dollars.

As a player, Jordan astonished even Bird and Johnson, great trash-talkers in their own right, who weren’t anxious to pay any callow youth an undeserved compliment.

When Jordan, then 23, scored 63 points in a 1986 playoff game in Boston, breaking Elgin Baylor’s postseason record, Bird announced: “If God was a basketball player, he’d be Michael Jordan.”

Johnson became an abject fan, as did Laker Vice President Jerry West, another all-time great and a tough judge of talent. “I’ve seen some incredible players,” West says. “I mean, the Lakers had some incredible players--Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson--and it’s awful to say, but Michael Jordan is the best player I’ve ever seen.

“People get enamored with his spectacular physical presence, but his skill level . . . if his skill level wasn’t that good, he’d be another guy who you’d see on the highlight films a lot, but he wouldn’t have been thought of as maybe the greatest player that ever played the game. Right now, I don’t know who’s a better jump-shooter.”

It took Jordan seven seasons to crack the final barrier, a championship that would prove to those who knew no better that he wasn’t just a fancy gunner. They were brilliant seasons to fans but interminable to Jordan, no one to be kept waiting. He publicly instructed General Manager Jerry Krause in his duties, and when the young Bulls kept getting eliminated in the playoffs by the veteran Pistons, he belittled teammates in the newspapers, referring to them again and again as “my supporting cast.”

During the 1990 Eastern finals against Detroit, in which the talented but fragile Scottie Pippen had bouts of migraine headaches, Jordan challenged teammates publicly, then declared an impromptu press boycott to underline his displeasure. James Jordan dropped by the press room to assure reporters that Michael wasn’t angry at them, just making a point.

After that, it would become a rite of spring, Jordan holing up during the playoffs to get some rest before the finals, at which time the league would order him to talk. Last spring, Commissioner David Stern, arriving in Chicago to partake of the ratings-blockbuster Bulls-Orlando series, was dismayed to find that Jordan had stopped talking, followed by every starter on both teams. Stern immediately fined the Bulls (his preferred way of punishing Jordan, as the infant Emperor of China’s servants were beaten when The Son of Heaven was naughty) and everything went back to normal.

There had never been anyone like Jordan. Stars like Spike Lee and Bill Murray clung to his sleeve. The Bulls were less like a basketball team than a touring rock band.

After a game against the Bullets in the suburbs of Washington, a crown princess of Saudi Arabia sent word that she’d like to meet Jordan but was turned down. Said Bulls publicist Tim Hallam, wearily: “There’s a crown princess in every city.”

The Bulls broke through in 1991, winning their first NBA title in a five-game rout of the Lakers. Afterward, Jordan sat on a bench in the visitors’ dressing room at the Forum, weeping openly, cradling the huge Larry O’Brien Trophy, with his father at his side. The journey of a lifetime was over.

Of course, it wasn’t, but Jordan was only 28, so how was he to know?

The Bulls won titles in the next two seasons, the first team to win three in a row since the legendary Celtics of the ‘60s, but Jordan found himself progressively enmeshed in controversy, some of it innocently. In the 1993 Eastern final against the New York Knicks, he went to an Atlantic City, N.J., casino on an off-night and woke up to find it plastered all over the august New York Times, igniting a classic media feeding frenzy--and Jordan’s annual press boycott. No sooner had that furor died down then a former golf partner published a book, alleging that Jordan had lost more than $1 million in golf bets to him.

That summer, James Jordan, father, friend and constant source of support, was found murdered in his car in South Carolina. A few months later, on the eve of training camp, his emotionally spent son, who had accomplished as much as he’d dreamed and earned more than he could have imagined, announced his retirement, with 21 rueful references to the press as “you people.”

He wanted more time with his wife, Juanita, and their three children. He wanted to mow the lawn. He didn’t want to see “you people” anymore.

A few months later, on a whim, he took up baseball, a sport he hadn’t played competitively since childhood and one in which he had never been considered a prospect. He said his family would accompany him to Birmingham, Ala., where he’d play for a Chicago White Sox farm team. He was Michael Jordan. He could do whatever he wanted and say whatever he wanted.

*

As a baseball player, Jordan was like the potentate in the “Emperor’s New Clothes.”

He could dress like a baseball player, hang out with baseball players, take batting practice, slouch around elegantly like a baseball player. He just couldn’t play baseball.

He hit .202 at Birmingham, a failing grade for anyone, much less a 31-year-old outfielder with no power. Nevertheless, his manager praised his progress, and the press used the quotes as if they meant something.

In fact, Jordan was there on a free pass from Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who also owned the Bulls, but events conspired to persuade people to take it all seriously. Baseball was locked in a labor impasse that would cancel the World Series, and even some purists were moved by the willingness of this superstar to humble himself for love of their game. Hoping to disappear into the camaraderie of the clubhouse--”I kept waiting for the day I wasn’t the story,” he told his biographer, Bob Greene--Jordan found himself the biggest story in a sport he couldn’t play.

Intimates like Charles Barkley of the Phoenix Suns, who saw Jordan that winter when he played in the Instructional League, knew he was aching to return to basketball. Mike needed only a reason to pull the rip cord and found one in spring training in Bradenton, Fla., when Sox management told players who were refusing to play in exhibitions--the strike was still on--to vacate the major league clubhouse. Jordan vacated camp, Florida and his baseball career.

Within days of returning to Chicago, he was practicing with the Bulls and hinting that he’d return, resulting in a 10-day circus. The press camped on the doorstep of the team’s training facility, reporting bogus scoops one after another and amusing itself with such tricks as taping over the card reader on the gate to the players’ parking lot in the hope that Jordan would have to get out of his car for a photo op.

Jordan’s decision came in a two-word statement released through his agent’s Washington office--”I’m back”--but it wasn’t that easy.

In his fifth game, he lit up the Great White Way, scoring 55 points against the Knicks in a celebrity-jammed Madison Square Garden, but the Bulls lost in the second round of the playoffs to the young Orlando Magic. The series turned in Game 1 when Jordan, trying to protect the ball and a lead in the final seconds, let a Magic player come up behind him and bat the ball away. The series ended with a spent Jordan making mistake after mistake in Game 6.

“He was really frustrated with his shooting ability,” says Bulls Coach Phil Jackson. “He was frustrated with his defense, his ability to move his feet the way that he’d been able to do in the past. His stamina never got there . . . .

“And then, of all things, a man who’s got extrasensory perception and such great court awareness, to have what happened to him in the first game against Orlando, I think it was the most frustrating and disappointing, perhaps, act he’s ever had in basketball.”

*

They don’t do penance the way they used to.

Jordan didn’t retire to some sweaty gym to work on his game over the summer. He spent much of it in Los Angeles, making a movie with Bugs Bunny. The studio built him his very own Mikedome--basketball court, weight room, etc.--on its parking lot, and Jordan worked out religiously with other NBA players who streamed onto the lot to play in all-star pickup games.

Unassuming as he appears, Jordan has become a star of stars, chauffeured in limos, escorted by bodyguards, pursued by fans and every manner of sponsor and news organization. He will sit for interviews with NBA partners such as NBC (which generally uses his friend, Ahmad Rashad, to interview him, gingerly) and TNT, but everyone else has to join the pack.

Jordan has appeared on covers of magazines as disparate as Fortune and L’Uomo, but he turns down 20 for every one he agrees to. Magazine editors rate him as harder to get than movie stars such as Robert DeNiro. Jordan likes to pose, but his idea of a shoot is to have everything set up in advance before he walks through for five minutes: Here I am, fire away. For every cover of Jordan looking dazzling, there’s a trail of unanswered phone messages to his agent’s office, broken photo editors and photographers praying they remembered to take the lens cap off.

It isn’t easy to remain down-to-earth in a world trying to kiss one’s feet, but fame doesn’t make him dizzy anymore. It was the real Michael Jordan who reported this season, the old living legend. There are few people left who ever saw Babe Ruth hit a home run, and Muhammad Ali’s shuffle is only a memory, but Jordan remains. Fans seem to realize that they’re in the presence of something special; in arenas all across the land, whenever he shoots a free throw or goes in for a dunk, flashbulbs go off all over in an impromptu light show. It’s as if they’re afraid he’ll disappear again.

Jordan is having too much fun to leave. He says he’ll play three more years, a decision worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the NBA, whose TV contracts will expire in two.

“I was delighted to read that,” says Turner Sports programming head Kevin O’Malley. “That didn’t just make my day; it made my month.”

“I have a whole different appreciation for this game and for the life that I live,” Jordan says. “I experienced it as a young guy, but now I’m experiencing it as a mature guy who knows all the different nooks and crannies. I can make the choices better. I’m in much more control of my life and my basketball life than I’ve ever been. And that makes things a little bit more relaxed and a little bit more fun.” He looks like he’s having a lot more fun. He recently called the Chicago Tribune’s Sam Smith, who wrote “The Jordan Rules,” by name for the first time since the book came out five years ago. Michael Jordan is back on his throne, and everything is finally the way it is supposed to be.