Air Today

I burn my candle at both ends,

It will not last the night.

But oh, my foes, and ah, my friends,

It gives a lovely light.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

*

Old obsessions die hard, his and ours.

Proving you can too go home again, at least literally, if not metaphorically, Michael Jordan has returned to this pretty seaside town, so casually developed that it hardly qualifies as a resort, as if to launch himself anew on an unsuspecting world as he did 20 years ago.

Only this time, he’s not an 18-year-old, headed up I-40 for Chapel Hill. Nor will the world be caught by surprise.

A Super Bowl-sized crowd turned out for his news conference in Washington on media day. ESPN and ESPN News carried it live, a staffer adding wryly, “Classic is going to take it on a five-second delay.”

A press corps of about 250 has come south with the Washington Wizards, with camera crews from all the networks, not to mention every hamlet in North Carolina with a transmitter, all panting for that precious first footage--Mike back on a basketball court!

It turns out to be a long time coming. The first morning’s practice is closed, and there are no interviews afterward. Major league baseball markets spring training so adroitly, an entire tourist season has grown up around it, but if you want to know if NBA players stretched, you have to ask someone who was allowed in.

So 250 press people troop back to their motels to explain to their offices, or do stand-ups in front of Laney High, where Jordan was once cut from the varsity; or visit the Cape Fear Museum, which has his first pay stub from Whitey’s restaurant ($145); or go by his old house, where the new owners keep his bedroom as it was, with the Michael Jordan posters on the walls.

At 8 p.m., the doors to the gym at UNC Wilmington finally open for the end of the evening practice. Camera crews rush in ... to find Jordan sitting on the bench, done for the day, watching his teammates scrimmage.

This is no accident. Jordan has never reconciled his love of Being Michael Jordan with his disdain for being crowded, and he’s unhappy about the controversy surrounding his latest comeback.

Of course, Mike needs doubters to provide him with challenges. Now, at least, he has all the doubters he needs.

“I wouldn’t add any fuel to that fire,” says Courtney Alexander, a young Wizard guard who played in the Chicago pickup games that Jordan hosted to see if he still had it.

“I wouldn’t do that. I don’t question any part of his game right now. You know, people want to come up with different things to make Air Jordan come down a little bit but he’s still Michael, to me....

“Michael takes challenges head-on, and for people to question him publicly, that’s kind of what he wants. That’s what he thrives on. He has nothing to prove to anybody but, obviously, people still feel the need to have, you know ... doubt. That doesn’t do anything but make him want to come here that much more.”

Of course, everyone--Jordan, Wizards, press, fans--might be taking this a tad too seriously, but it’s actually reassuring.

After all that talk about perspective in the post-Sept. 11 world, and athletes knowing their place, this is more like that “normalcy” everyone talks about.

If our old innocence meant caring about the inconsequential, with reporters rushing around like lemmings and the teams barricading the doors, everyone seems to be trying to get back there.

For the moment, it’s still only a sports story and doesn’t seem as important as it used to. But it’s still early and we can all hope.

Can’t Find a Wizard When You Need One

In 1994, we were New York in the ‘40s, Paris in the ‘20s.... The young duo [Chris Webber and Juwan Howard] were compared--if with tongue in cheek--in this paper with the Medici, even to the Messiah.

--Marc Fisher, Washington Post

*

The young duo turned out to be more like the James Gang, and there went another decade.

This was the franchise that got it backward. It had its best days before the NBA renaissance in the ‘80s, before it moved from suburban Landover into the MCI Center in downtown D.C. and changed its name from the politically incorrect “Bullets” to a more benign “Wizards,” which became an NBA synonym for “stiffs.”

The dream turned into a farce, with wild parties and late-night arrests. By the 1998 lockout, frustration was so rampant, the Wizards traded the 25-year-old Webber for 33-year-old Mitch Richmond, dimming the lights on Party Central but dropping the team into the depths of the East.

There it moldered until the 1999-2000 season, when minority owner Ted Leonsis, an AOL multimillionaire, made the newly retired Jordan an offer he couldn’t refuse: the presidency and a 10% stake for a nominal investment.

The catch was, the Wizards were hopeless, locked into huge long-term contracts with Richmond, Howard and Rod Strickland. Characteristically, Jordan refused to accept that, but he’d learn, if slowly. As an administrator, he was a rookie, and an absentee one at that, running the team from his Chicago home or a resort in the Caribbean.

He promised a playoff team. Instead, the players staged a yearlong mutiny against Jordan’s coach, Leonard Hamilton. Once, Hamilton ordered Tyrone Nesby off the bench and Nesby refused to go. Hamilton had to have arena security escort Nesby off.

When Jordan did show up, it was to blast the team, after it had blown a 19-point fourth-quarter lead over the Clippers at home.

Replied Howard, unimpressed, “We win together as a team and we lose together as a team and I think he’s part of the team.”

Jordan replied, lamely, he was nobody’s “show pony,” he wasn’t going to try to sell mediocrity but would be around more when they started winning.

The D.C. press, which had swooned at his feet upon arrival, got back up and started zinging away.

“Jan. 3, 2000, Michael Jordan wasn’t here and Jan. 3, 2001, Michael Jordan might as well not be here and he usually isn’t here,” Andy Pollin, the sports director of WTEM, the team’s flagship radio station, told the Post.

“The worst thing is that it is the same old Wizards. We rarely do open phones very much and when we do, nobody really calls up. It’s worse than hating him. Nobody is even interested anymore.”

Finally wising up to his predicament, Jordan traded Howard and stripped the team so it would finally have some salary cap room ... but not until the summer of 2003.

The Wizards limped in at 19-63, looking worse than an overmatched team, more like one that had quit.

“It’s tough when you don’t have any hope and we didn’t have that last year,” guard Hubert Davis said. “ ... It’s tough when you play 82 games and you not only get beat, you’re getting beat by 30.

“You’re out there working hard and it’s just not producing wins and that’s frustrating. It’s a long season and you only win 19 games out of 61/2 months, that’s tough.”

Help was coming, if in disguise. Jordan, who had gained 20 pounds, had begun practicing with the team to get the weight off, insisting, as usual, it meant nothing.

Then he discovered he wanted to play for real. After that, nothing, even a broken rib, or no one, even his friend, Charles Barkley, who told him it was a no-win proposition, could dissuade him.

“I’m just trying to play a game of basketball,” Jordan said at his news conference. “What if I’m tired of playing at the YMCAs and the Boys and Girls Clubs and I want to step up to the elite competition?”

He hired Doug Collins, who had coached him in Chicago. Incisive and excitable, Collins combines a boy-next-door charm with a werewolf flip side, but if he stresses out players, he gets them to play. Taking over a 30-win Bulls’ team, he got it to 50 in two seasons. Taking over the 28-win Pistons, he got them to 54 in two.

Of course, in Chicago, he also worried so much about being spied on by General Manager Jerry Krause, he stopped talking to one assistant, Phil Jackson, and barred another, Tex Winter, from practice.

Collins was sacked in 1989, a season before the Bulls won the first of their six titles. Perhaps the worst part was knowing that Jordan, whom Collins revered, could have kept him there if he had wanted to, but Jordan let it happen.

Then, out of the blue, 12 years later, Jordan called to ask Collins if he wanted to coach him again.

“Well, it’s the ultimate sign of respect,” Collins says. “What it does is that it tells you that the three years we spent together, Michael felt were very positive years. So that was nice for me to know that, that he would reach out for me in this situation.

“I never had that kind of talent, but I think I had that same kind of heart and I think Michael wants somebody passionate being with him. And there’s a lot of work to be done here. And I’m hoping, as our players have left here the last couple of days, that you can see there’s a different, maybe, pride, and a different energy and the guys are starting to feel good about themselves....

“We can score points. The one thing, as I see this team more, it’s going to be our toughness. That is, when we’re on the road and we’re in a tough game with seven, eight minutes to go and you’ve got to get a stop, do we have the toughness to dig in?

“‘Cause this team last year collapsed.... Fortunately, 16 of the 20 guys who were here [when Jordan became president] are not. So we’ve got a chance to start over.”

No one knows what, if anything, Jordan’s return will get them in the long run, but in the short run, for the Wizards at least, it’s progress.

We’ll have to see what it is for Jordan.

Anyone Need an Aura in Perfect Condition?

Winning isn’t always championships. What’s wrong with helping kids find their way, teaching them the game?

--Jordan, before announcing his return

*

It’s funny, we chastise guys for being scared and not wanting to take a gamble. But then when we have a guy who’s willing to do that, we chastise him for that too.

--Orlando Coach Doc Rivers

*

Jordan’s first NBA comeback was a dream. He was 32. Chicago went out of its gourd. The Bulls added Dennis Rodman, who made Jordan look like a Boy Scout and the voice of reason, and won titles in 1996, 1997 and 1998.

Now he’s 38 and his press is mixed, tending toward “Gag me with a spoon.”

“The indulging of an ego run amok,” wrote the New York Post’s Wally Matthews.

“The man is bored, restless, and unable to exit the stage,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan.

It’s not only sportswriters. When you’re as big as Jordan, lots of people have an opinion on everything he does, and see in him what they want to see.

“Most retirees in every field now move on to something else that is fulfilling,” wrote USA Today founder Al Neuharth on the paper’s editorial page. “ ... Jordan, 38, had a great alternative as president of the Washington Wizards.”

By way of example, Neuharth added modestly he, himself, is fulfilled “at age 77 as a columnist, consultant and speaker after a quarter-century as a media mogul.”

Nor does this season figure to end in triumph.

Jordan called the Bulls “my supporting cast” when he was upset, but they were more supportive than the fuzzy-cheeked, awe-struck Wizards will be.

“I see him on the bus and I’m like, ‘Man, that’s Michael Jordan,”’ rookie Brendan Haywood told the Post’s Steve Wyche. “Or I’m on the plane sitting beside Mike and it’s something I didn’t think would happen. It’s weird. You catch yourself staring at him but then you get out of it.”

Worst of all may be the expectations. Even if Jordan approaches his old level and leads the Wizards into playoff contention, it may not be good enough for his public.

Nevertheless, nothing counts, for Mike, at least, other than that he wants to play again.

Actually, it’s not hard to believe he’s back, as he says, “for the love of the game.” He doesn’t need the money, he got plenty of attention without playing and he doesn’t enjoy the hassle.

Yet, here he is.

He has sold his interest in the team, so there’s no certainty--and, indeed, much skepticism--that he’ll return to the Wizard front office.

The scenario of rebuilding the team to help attract free agents in 2003 is fading, with Vince Carter, Paul Pierce and Antawn Jamison signing long-term, and Tim Duncan unlikely to relocate to the Eastern Seaboard. Now the Wizards will also forgo their high lottery pick and a chance at Duke’s Jason Williams or China’s Yao Ming next spring.

On the other hand, Jordan will have a last adventure, with the Wizards along for the ride.

“I mean, to be in that huddle again and look in his eyes, even in a scrimmage, is really an incredible feeling,” Collins says.

” ... It’s almost like now, the comedians got to start making people laugh again a little bit. This is a tragic, tragic time, but we’ve got to have some kind of enjoyment, with all that we’ve gone through, and who’s the greatest entertainer in basketball?

“Michael Jordan. Until someone shows me different, he’s still the king.”

Maybe so, but this time around, the kingdom is restless.