Michael Jordan’s Last Shot

By Oytun
for NBA-Basketball.org

Published: September 21, 2009

It’s been over a decade since we last saw the true MJ. There are days when I watch the current crop of elite NBA players and I get faint memories of Michael Jordan and wish somehow he was still out there, somehow still actively taking part in this sport that he carried for so long. I know it’s never going to happen, and as MJ said and countless others have repeated over the last 15 years…there will never be another Michael Jordan. Not because there won’t be someone more talented, not because there won’t be someone more marketable, not because there won’t be someone who wins as much. It’s because no matter what happens, there will only be one person that made you fall in love with the sport.. and that person will always have a place in history. For MJ, it just so happens that he came at the right time, was in the right place, and did exactly the right things.

Several days prior to Jordan’s Hall of Fame induction speech, I decided to load up some old DVD’s of Michael Jordan to remind myself of the man that has been the hero of the basketball world for the past 20 years. I had to remember exactly all that was great about him.

Frankly, there wasn’t much that I had forgotten..because there wasn’t much to forget. It was all very simple and formulaic of a basketball god: the game winners, the amazing highlights, the usual heroic ‘against all odds’ moments, the revolutionary advertisements, and then there’s the motive behind MJ – being ‘cut’ from his varsity team.

For years we’ve been led to believe that MJ’s inspiration came from this one single event. As textbook as it sounded, it never convinced me or made me understand the person behind the player that was Michael Jordan. A lot of people get cut or don’t make it in their high school varsity team, why would this single event turn a player from average to the best of all time? It just didn’t add up, and I swept the issue under a rug and from that point on and just simply started looking at him not like a fellow human, but as a unique and talented once-in-a-century kind of special being along with Da Vinci, Einstein, Newton and the like.

That is, until I heard Michael Jordan’s induction speech into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Michael Jordan gave a shocking speech that no one really expected – it probably didn’t help that he went after John Stockton, David Robinson, and Jerry Sloan – three of the most low key stars to have ever played the game.

Gone was the Nike scripts, gone was the Phil Jackson plays, gone was the Air Jordan’s and the 23 Jersey. What we got was Michael Jeffrey Jordan, raw, unedited, real, uncut for the first time ever. His speech started with tears – tears that foreshadowed that Michael Jordan would strip his soul bare that night, and show the word who he really was.

He began with the question “What don’t you know about me?”. 20 minutes later, it became apparently clear that none of us really knew Michael Jordan after all. Sure there are those that will say we all knew that MJ was a competitive maniac bent on winning and destroying competition as much as possible. But that’s not what we found out on that Saturday night.

What we found out was that a sports star isn’t like a scientist or an artist where you are able to rise to immortality status with a spark of genius. Sports has a set limit of rules, sports is a direct competition with other equally equipped people, sports is a fixed mountain to climb where you need to constantly work and work and work to keep climbing and have a chance to stay at the top.

What we were reminded of was not simply MJ’s competitive spirit, but most importantly that heroes don’t exist.

For some, they would have like to swallow the blue pill and pretend they never had found out such a thing. It’s human nature to want to look up to something, to idolize something great. We would have liked to believe that Jordan was just supernatural, that he was special, that he was something we can never be. Some of us wanted him to close the history book of Michael Jordan on a Hollywood moment of perfection – like his shot against the Jazz in 1998 – and give us that honorable ending that true heroes deserve. But it wouldn’t be, just as his last shot in basketball, which we have conveniently forgotten, came at the freethrow line in April with his Wizards entering the wrong kind of lottery. Jordan decided that again, he wasn’t going to go out like the hero that most of us wanted…because Jordan knew that he wasn’t some fairy tale hero, he was just like any of us, a flawed but 100% human being who was determined to achieve extraordinary things.

Jordan revealed to us exactly what was the reason behind his success in his widely hated induction speech. Hardwork, that’s what it was..not something otherwordly or fabricated like what his brand ‘Nike’ pushed him to represent for his whole career.

He simply worked harder than anybody, tried harder than anybody, kept pushing himself to the limit like no one ever wanted. He simply was able to reach the max level of what a person could possibly do. That doesn’t make him a hero, it simply makes him one of the very very few who was able to push aside the pain, the complacency, the doubts, and reach his full potential. The fuel behind that wasn’t a simple decision from his basketball coach…nor was it really all the struggles and haters along the way he lengthily talked about in his speech. The fuel was that he wanted to succeed more than anything in the world, all those motivational tools could have been fabricated for all he cared..in fact most of them were. All those stories of people doubting him, people not believing in him – they might have motivated him to work harder, but above all it reminded him that he had not reached the status he believe he could reach. By pushing himself to the limit, he got there, and when he did he was ready to walk away from the game.

The lesson here is that life is a simple formula that we could all follow: choose something you want to succeed in, work as hard as you can, believe in yourself, and never give up until you reach the point which you believe you deserve . All along we have been fooled into thinking that it was something else, because that’s what we wanted to believe – we don’t like to believe in simple things. Looking at Michael Jordan as a hero took away from his accomplishments, it took away all that lifelong work and pain and criticism and replaced it with something fake –“hero”, “dream”, “magic”, “miracle”.

Most importantly, it took away from he wanted to teach the millions of children who have, who are, and who will look up to him. This time he wasn’t going to stand for it, he wasn’t going to care about his legacy, his Hall of Fame moment, his sponsorships, the media, not even the room full of esteemed past colleagues that was in the room before him. After 35,087 shots throughout his professional career, he had to make the final one count.

“Limits, just like fears….are nothing but illusions.”

Swish.

Author:Oytun

Oytun is a big fan of basketball since being a small kid etc.etc

Oytun has written 3 articles for us.

Tagged with: hall of fame, jordan hall of fame, michael jordan critics, michael jordan hall of fame, mj hall of fame speech

Michael Jordan’s Last Shot

Author:Oytun

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