Jordan’s Electricity Will Light Up Team, City

Michael Jordan joining the Washington Wizards will not guarantee they’ll make the playoffs or that one of the least successful franchises in the NBA will suddenly be turned due north. But what is certain, now that Jordan has signed on to play, is that the Wizards will be a viable, legitimate outfit to be taken seriously. They’ve had few national TV dates in the last 20 years, but they will now. The details of their games and seasons have been almost ignored for most of the last two decades; suddenly every dribble they take will be chronicled. It’s a franchise that has operated under the radar except during the brief but exciting Chris Webber-Juwan Howard period several years ago.

One thing we know is that no team with Michael Jordan will be ignored. The Wizards now will be talked about, argued over and--most importantly--watched. That might not matter very much for the Knicks, the Lakers or even the recently dormant Celtics. But it’s food to the starving here. That the Wizards might actually be taken seriously is nothing short of a revelation.

During the last season of Jordan’s second run of championships, I went as I always did to Chicago to cover a playoff game. Since the Bullets/Wizards were never in the playoffs, I had to get my NBA playoff fix where I could find it. Where else would you have gone to find the pulse of the playoffs? Dallas? Cleveland? I showed up one night in the second round of the Eastern Conference playoffs, and Jordan said, “You’re here already? Can’t you ever stay home and cover your own team?” Turning slightly serious, he said, “I can’t imagine my season being over in April every single year. I can’t imagine making the playoffs once every seven or eight years.”

Of course, he couldn’t. Jordan would go about the business of carrying the Bulls into the middle of June. And we in Washington would look on jealously, never knowing the excitement of game nights that feel like Christmas, with seats impossible to come by.

There is nothing bad about this for the Washington Wizards or for the nation’s capital. It’s good, even if the team doesn’t make the playoffs. It will be fascinating to follow how closely Jordan resembles the IMAX Jordan, the icon who played basketball, as one writer said, better than anybody else did anything. We’ll be riveted to see if a whole slew of young stars--from Kobe Bryant and Allen Iverson to Vince Carter and Ray Allen--can make Jordan just look like another old man who should have stayed retired. How much can smarts make up for quickness lost? We’ll be neck-deep into whether Richard Hamilton and Courtney Alexander will be better because they’re running every night with Jordan, practicing with him, lifting weights with him, strategizing with him.

I’ll admit I didn’t feel any need to see Jordan come back to play again, not in Chicago, not in Washington. But he could never get the euphoria from being an executive as he could from jamming over Clyde Drexler in June. I thought the way he dumped those three huge contracts and acquired four first-round picks in a couple of months (Alexander, Etan Thomas, Kwame Brown, Brendan Haywood) was testimony to how well he functioned as the club’s president, regardless of whatever criticism you hear.

But now that he is back, I’ll watch every game possible. Still, I’ve got very mixed feelings, as do the great majority of people who call themselves Chicagoans. Putting on a jersey that doesn’t belong to the Bulls seems, well, blasphemous. Imagine Cal Ripken wearing a Cubs jersey.

Michael Jordan was the man who, all by himself, delivered Chicago from Al Capone and from the infamous Democratic Convention of 1968. When I left Chicago in 1980, it was an OK city, big and tough but unsure of itself. By the mid-1990s--the process started in the 1980s--it had become a great city, not coincidentally on Jordan’s watch. It was Jordan, leading the Bulls to six championships in eight years, who allowed Chicago to shed its “Second City” image (and psychology), particularly since he repeatedly dismantled New York’s lordly Knicks in the playoffs. Chicago took on his persona, defiant and capable of great achievement that once seemed unthinkable. The city never had more energy than on game nights in the 1990s. I don’t feel that vibrato any longer. The city is as elegant and as strong as it’s ever been, but it doesn’t soar anymore.

Washington won’t get to feel that kind of energy for very long, if to that extent at all, because this isn’t a long-term arrangement. We don’t know how well Jordan, who will turn 39 in February, can play because he has missed three seasons, because he has had injuries throughout this comeback, and because as Shaq quite eloquently told me this summer, “Bro, 39 ain’t 29.”

John Thompson, a man who knows so much about basketball, said Tuesday that those of us who expect the Wizards to suddenly vault to .500 or beyond are fooling ourselves. He’ll be working with a high school center and a bunch of guys who couldn’t win 20 games last season. Thompson, who quickly says he hopes he is wrong, makes such a compelling case you have to flinch.

What has me thinking the Wizards can approach .500 is the combination of Jordan and Coach Doug Collins, who has never had a bad team. But I’m not about to get bogged down with matchups and predictions now. There will be plenty of time for that, especially with the Redskins falling off the local sporting landscape by the first of November.

While Washington prepares to follow a compelling basketball story for the first time in more than 20 years, it saddens me how many people outside greater D.C. seem to resent Jordan’s return. I understand that folks love a happy ending, and there’s almost no way Jordan can make this stint with the Wizards any more than a P.S. In some quarters, there’s even anger that he is coming back.

That’s foolish and and petty.

I don’t think of Willie Mays stumbling in a Mets uniform; I see him with his back to the plate chasing down that blast off the bat of Vic Wertz. I don’t see Ali getting pounded by Trevor Berbick; I see him floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. If Jordan is only 75 percent of his old, championship self, as may be the case, that’ll be just fine. Given how much we enjoyed Jordan’s career, imagine how much he must have enjoyed it. If he can come back, lift up the local basketball franchise even temporarily, how great is that? How can we object to this? Anyone who does is a grinch.