No Heir Jordan: The NBA Lockout and the End of an Era

NoHeir Jordan: The NBA Lockout and the End of an Era byDavid Leonard | NewBlackMan
TheNBA lockout is over.  With theplayers and the owners having reached an agreement, basketball will returnbeginning Christmas Day.  Ushering in substantial structural changes to the league, which willlikely restrict player movement and constrain middle-class player salaries, theNBA lockout will also go down in history as an end to the search for the nextMichael Jordan.  Since MJ'sretirement, the league, its marketing partners, and fans alike have pinned forsomeone to fill his AIR Jordans. Each anointed as the next Michael Jordan, Penny Hardaway, Grant Hill,Vince Carter and Harold Miner ("Baby Jordan") all failed to deliver because ofinjuries, limited production, or a combination of both.  Each in their own right was imagined asa player who could fill the shoes, whose talents, charisma, and athleticismwould propel the NBA during its post-Jordan era.  None of them met these expectations resulting in an NBA in continuedsearch for a twenty-first century basketball God.    
KobeBryant and LeBron James each took the mantle of the next Jordan to places noneof the other NMJ (next Michael Jordan) had reached.  Kobe, because of his talents, the ways in which he patternedhis game and demeanor after Jordan, his quest for rings, and most importantlyhis competitiveness, all elevated the comparisons, leading many to argue thathe was the NMJ.  Yet because ofEagle County, Colorado, because of his conflicts with Shaquille O'Neal and theultimate demise of the Lakers Dynasty, and because he is said to have demandedto get out of Los Angeles, Kobe has fallen short in other's quest to find thenext Michael Jordan.  Like Kobe,LeBron James has delivered on the court, dazzling fans with his passing skills,his athleticism, and his ability to make his teammates better.  Worse than struggling to secure atitle, LeBron James fall short in the MJ sweepstakes when he decided to takehis talents to South Beach.
Whilepossessing the skills, charisma, and baller potential, the two most promisingplayers to lead the NBA, to build upon the global popularity established byJordan, have fallen short not because of their basketball talents but theirinability (or our inability) to fill mythical shoes.  The quest to find the Next Michael Jordan, thus, has nothingto do with basketball but rather is part of an effort to find a player whoreinforces popular narratives about the American Dream, the protestant workethnic, and post-racialness. 
Jordan,only seen in public in his basketball uniform or a $3,000-dollar suit, Jordanembodied the politics of racial respectability on and off the court.  He "allow[ed] us to believe what wewish to believe: that in this country, have-nots can still become haves; thatthe American dream is still working" (Ken Naughton quoted in Andrews2000, p. 175).  David Falk,Jordan's agent, celebrated the dialectics between his dominance in themarketplace, his worldwide popularity, and racial identity in illustrativeways:
When playersof color become stars they are no longer perceived as being of color.  The color sort of vanishes.  I don't think people look at MichaelJordan anymore and say he's a black superstar.  They say he's a superstar.  They totally accepted him into the mainstream.  Before he got there he might have beenAfrican American, but once he arrived, he had such a high level of acceptancethat I think that description goes away (Quoted in Rhoden, 2006 , p. 204). 
Amidthe 1980s and 1990s, amid Reagan's dismantling of America's safety net and hiselevation of the War on Drugs, Jordan provided more than a wicked jump shot,playing a lead role in the Republican Revolution.  He was "cast as a spectacular talent, midsized, well-spoken,attractive, accessible, old-time values, wholesome, clean, natural, not toogoody-two shoes, without a bit of deviltry in him" (Falk quoted in Andrews2001, p. 125).   Imaginedas emblematic of the power and importance of  "personal drive, responsibility, integrity, and success," asopposed to "the stereotypical representations of deviant, promiscuous, andirresponsible black males," Jordan's racially transcendent, colorblind-driven,raceless image was always tied to racial language.  He represented the possibility of acceptance by whites(racial transcendence), which meant he was able to "transcend his own race"(Rhoden 2006, p. 204), or better said, constraints of the "facts of blackness." 
Thelongstanding struggle for the next Jordan has been a journey in search of thenext the  "Africanized HoratioAlger" (Patton quoted in McDonald,2001, p. 157) to lead the NBA. The search has failed in part because of the inability of the nextgeneration of players to fulfill the imagined narrative and qualities associatedwith Jordan.  Michael Jordan wasthe leader of an "army of athletes who possess the (new) right stuff withmodest beginnings, skill, and personal determination" (McDonald 2001, p.157).  In the dominant imagination, theserecent players lack "the right stuff," leading to a paradigm shift facilitatedby the 2011 lockout. 
Therecent celebration of Kevin Durant illustrates how the search for America'snext Michael Jordan has little to do with basketball and is all about thenarrative, the ideology, and the overall mythical representation embodied byJordan.  David Heeb, in "NBALockout 2011: Searching for the Next Michael Jordan," encapsulates thenarrative and ideological elements central to the proverbial MJ Search:
So after allthese years, we are still looking for "The Next Jordan."  Will we ever see another player thatgreat?  Maybe not, but the firstthing we have to understand is, when looking for "The Next Jordan,"we have to stop looking for guys that look like Jordan.  Instead, we have to look at what madeJordan tick.  What made him burn tobe great?  We all know the story ofhow he was cut from his high school basketball team, and how he couldn't beathis older brother Larry in the backyard one-one games they would play.  We all heard the Hall of Fame speech,where Jordan recalled how he remembered even the slightest challenges to hisgreatness.  Michael Jordan was thekind of guy that got out of bed every morning looking for a challenge.  He looked for hurdles to jumpover.  He searched for mountains toclimb.  If there were no worthyopponents, he just invented insults, so he could say he had to prove himselfall over again . . . . That doesn't change the fact that Kevin Durant might be"Next." Jordan had a "love of the game" clause in hiscontract, permitting him to play pickup basketball whenever he wanted to.  Durant, like Jordan, loves thegame.  He will play anytime,anyplace, and against anybody.  Wehave seen him this summer playing pickup basketball all across the country.
Despitethe purported potential of Durant to be the heir to Jordan, the NBA hastranscended the struggle for the NMJ. 
TheNBA lockout, with its efforts to systematically change the system, will end thequest for the next Michael Jordan. In an attempt to remake the league in the fashion of the NFL (despitethe significant differences between the leagues), the NBA has traded in themarketed superstar for greater parity and emphasis on team rivalries.  The greatness of Jordan (and Magic,Bird, Kobe, Tim Duncan, and even Dr. J) came not just from their individualgreatness but because they were all part of dynasties.  At a basketball level, the ability ofteams to bring together the level of talent that surrounded these great playerswill nullified by the future collective bargaining agreement. 
Thesystemic changes resulting from the 2011 lockout will not only curtail theascendance of superstars who build their legacies through dynasties butreflects the league's abandonment of a star driven league.  The inability of LeBron, Kobe andCarmelo to attract Jordan level fan support prompted such a change. The fearsthat Durant, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, and Derrick Rose mightfollow in their footsteps guided the lockout.  In the end, the presumed failures of the players to deliveroff the court contributed to this shift. The low q-ratings of these players, and claims about player betrayals offans mandated a system change that has traded a league organized aroundsuperstars to one more focused on parity and competitiveness. 
Withthese changes, the league no longer needs another MJ; better said, the leagueseems to have decided that it could no longer wait for a player who coulddominate on the court and appeal to the masses of the court.    More importantly, given the ideological shifts thathave led to increasingly visible racism and the complete destruction of thepublic safety net, society at large no longer needs a Michael Jordan to justifythe abandonment of the 99% - that, like the search for the next MJ, is awrap. 
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of CriticalCulture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. Hehas written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing inboth popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy ofpopular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, andpopular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinemaand the forthcoming After Artest: Raceand the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.