AIR AND THE WORM
One has advertisements for himself inscribed on his body. The other hides his real personality behind a corporate facade. But both Dennis Rodman and Michael Jordan have transcended race to symbolize only themselves.
By JOE GIOIA
it would have been nice to open these observations on this season's NBA finals with a few comic remarks, but there has been nothing funny about how the Chicago Bulls have dominated Seattle's SuperSonics. Though last week's two games in Chicago were relatively close, the outcomes were never much in doubt after three quarters. The Bulls, though playing lackadaisically, demonstrated an appalling skill at scoring when needed from any part of the floor, and showed a defensive ability only slightly less smothering than an engine running in a closed garage.
Last Sunday, in Seattle for game three, they finally came to play and the game was over in six minutes. The Bulls don't just beat you, they raise doubts about your ability to compete. The effect of this on rival professionals is devastating. The Sonics, showing enormous heart, came back on Wednesday night to demolish the obviously flat Bulls, but their chances of winning the series remain only marginally better than the risk of spontaneous human combustion.
A telling moment occurred late in game two when, during a time out in the midst of putting the game out of Seattle's reach, Michael Jordan rubbed Dennis Rodman's Technicolor hair in a gesture that seemed at once affectionate and superstitious. The action was remarkable enough for NBC to replay after the commercial, for it showed in a very direct way this relation of polar opposites that drives the Bull's historic success.
One is a beloved figure of such Olympian beauty and accomplishment that he long ago assumed the name "Air." The other has demonstrated such an anti-social need to excel at what he does, such capacities for dementia in pursuit of his own mean ends, that his peers call him "The Worm." Jordan is remarkable for the grace with which he dispatches the ball, Rodman renowned for the nasty ways he manages to retrieve it. Jordan takes wing. Rodman, in the words of TV commentator Bill Walton, "gets in your head." It is doubtful that they are even friends, but between them they claim the high and the low ground of the entire game of basketball -- how it's played on the court, in the minds of their opponents and in the public's imagination.
"Air and The Worm" sounds like the title to a Blake poem, and we might do well to reflect a bit on what place Jordan and Rodman hold in that realm of mythical significance our greatest sports figures achieve. For if the first subject of American professional sports is winning, the second is surely race. And Jordan and Rodman, unique among their peers, and each in their own way, have used success to not so much redefine what it means to be African-American (the assigned role of black athletes from Jack Johnson to Muhammad Ali) as to finally transcend the subject altogether. Jordan owns a physical mastery that defies any human competition. Rodman has become a literal symbol, turning his body into something that promotes, as his coach Phil Jackson recently explained to the New York Times, "a reality change."
Consider basketball's place on our media landscape. The quick-cut rhythms of the NBA are perfect for TV. The professional basketball court is a brightly lit box bristling with cameras. The players on display there, in shorts and tank tops, are the most visible of our professional athletes. As such they are ideal avatars of style, and inevitably the style is, outwardly at least, African-American. But the coincident popularity of basketball and rap have allowed a commodification of negritude that is, though widely admired, finally no less deadly than older stereotypes. One gets the inescapable feeling that the black men most acceptable to the media, the ones who get the highest ratings, are criminals and basketball players.
To play is to pay. Shaquille O'Neal seeks respect as a rapper. Another rapper stands in for Sean Kemp in a sneaker ad set in a rundown Seattle cityscape. And in arguably the weirdest series of TV commercials in history, a jive-talking doll named Little Penny plagues the life of Anfernee Hardaway -- a mordant reminder to black professionals that they will never escape their funky selves. (The current ad that cleverly reveals some bad b-boys to be classically trained actors is a rare exception.) And it is worth noting that the most modest and dignified figures in basketball marketing, Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing, grew up outside the United States.
If the ultimate message of basketball style is that given the right gear aggression is cool, Rodman demonstrates how mind-blowing aggression really is. Spray-painted and tattooed -- a wag at ESPN said he resembles a highway overpass in a bad part of town -- transvested and bi-sexed, he is a devil doll of huge proportions (in an ad two seasons ago he even got to rough up Santa Claus). By covering his body with his own symbols Rodman has not left any room for other brands; it's not surprising that for the most part Madison Avenue has not gone near him. (With Rodman's new celebrity, that may change. Carl's Jr. is running an ad in which one of Rodman's tattoos snatches the burger out of his hand and devours it.) He exudes a menace beyond race, the frightening Other that respects nothing except the satisfaction of its urges.
Jordan, with his smooth head and gold earring, is a ringer for that eminent trademark Mr. Clean. If Muhammad Ali proved black is beautiful (and for those of a certain age, words cannot express or the heart contain the full meaning of Ali), it remained for Jordan to show just how astonishingly beautiful it can be; something that overcomes race to create the perfect self on which we project our dearest qualities of integrity and accomplishment.
It is a central irony that though Jordan, unlike Rodman, is an intensely private man who keeps his feelings hidden, his commercial persona is one of complete accommodation to the needs of society. Jordan seeks comity in the same land where Rodman is at large and presumed dangerous. In one current spot Jordan hangs forlornly from a basketball hoop a hundred feet off the ground, in another he endeavors to phone everyone in the United States. In his most touching ad, Jordan asks us, "If it wasn't for sports, would I still be your hero?" He, better than anyone, must know that if not for sports he wouldn't exist.
So let us revel tonight in the distinct glories of these two men, for while it is easy to make too much of a game, it is impossible to completely define a great athlete. Jordan and Rodman's ultimate genius, rare in our mediated world, is that they symbolize only themselves.
Joe Gioia's last piece for Salon was on body trends in the high-fashion world.
Who is Dennis Rodman? In Media Circus, a conversation with the man who ghostwrote The Worm's #1-selling book, "Bad As I Wanna Be."
Have Rodman and Jordan really transcended race? Speak your mind in Table Talk.