Basketball: The One And Only

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We let him do this because he is so good at letting us. He is clutch, not in a pained, John Wayne sense, but joyfully, shrugging and grinning as he backpedals away from each accomplishment. He makes us believe, against our own experience, that hard work can reward--that even 0.8 sec. means there is hope. And in doing so, he has defined masculinity despite publicly admitting that his favorite performers are Toni Braxton and Anita Baker; this guy could say his favorite movie was Beaches, and he'd still be the alpha male. He has unwittingly followed the plot of a hero, suffering like Ulysses: His father, to whom he was extremely close, was murdered in a carjacking in 1993. He left the game shortly thereafter, on a journey in a minor-league bus, getting $16 in food money a day and sleeping in less than four-star hotels. With his daily-shaved head hiding a hairline creeping to Burt Reynolds' at low tide, he returned to dominate the league for another three years. At least.

Should he quit, he cannot expect to lead the normal life he says he wants. On account of the ever growing hunger of the media, he has less chance than Muhammad Ali of taking his wife and three kids to the mall he keeps saying he longs to stroll. Because even in countries that don't have basketball courts (which, come to think of it, probably don't have malls), he's the man. Photographers traveling in Asia and Eastern Europe have used photos of him as currency. And in some countries, Americans are sometimes greeted by locals in the only words they know in English: Michael Jordan. It's one thing to be known by your first name if it's Elvis, but it's something entirely different to turn Michael into a signifier.

We will probably keep seeing him after he retires, his hypercompetitiveness perhaps leading him eventually to golf on the senior PGA tour, or at least the Nike tour (he's got to have an in there). Or perhaps he will be on the cover of FORTUNE again, only this time as the CEO he has been molding himself into. But even though 35 sounds too young to retire, it's old for an athlete, older for a shooting guard and ancient for the top player in the game. And, perhaps, just old. John Updike, who knows Phil Jackson, had his most famous character, Rabbit Angstrom, struggle to recapture the glory of his high school basketball days. "The fact that he peaked so early in his youth makes him true to life, truer than my own life is," Updike once told a reporter. "We all, in a way, peak at 18." Jordan got twice as much as most of us.

--Reported by Julie Grace with the Chicago Bulls, John U. Bacon/Detroit and Sally B. Donnelly/Washington