Playing for Keeps Quotes

“He was on the team, but he did not want to be a leader. When he arrived in Portland for the Tournament of the Americas, the pre-Olympic selection process for the Western Hemisphere, Brian McIntyre, the NBA’s head of media relations, mentioned to him that he had picked him for his team in a rotisserie league. ‘That’s a mistake,’ Jordan said. ‘I’m here to take it easy - it’s been a long season. I’m going to coast a bit while I’m here.’ He seemed to prove as much with a relatively casual performance in the first game. The next day, McIntyre saw him and said that based on Jordan’s own warning, he had traded him. ‘Who for?’ Jordan asked. Karl Malone, McIntyre said. ‘You screwed up,’ Jordan said. ‘It was classic Michael,’ McIntyre said, ‘somehow what I did was a challenge - I had slighted him - and so he went out and got about forty points against some poor Latin American team the next night.”
― David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made

“In the modern entertainment culture, in a society obsessed with celebrity, deeds performed on celluloid often seemed to become substitutes for reality, and an ever more careless audience took more and more of its reality off a television screen. Men whose heroism was completely artificial and was limited to acting upon Hollywood sets were increasingly perceived as heroes, and their deeds, however synthetic, had a resonance that lasted and formed its own reality. That had been true in the past… But now, given the growing power of the popular culture, the line between the authentic and the inauthentic was blurred more than ever.”
― David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made

“They both shared the same sense of obligation. 'If you were drafted by a team which was at the bottom, then part of the responsibility which went with your contract was to turn that team around and make it a winner - in fact, make it a champion. That was an obligation and it was deeply felt. It was about not just being a player, but in a larger sense a citizen, and they both shared that feeling. Larry thought he owed Boston a winner, and Michael thought he owed Chicago a winner. That was part of their job, part of their contract,' Ford said. 'I'm afraid not a lot of people feel that way today.”
― David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made

“It was as if it were a university within a university, with its own exceptional set of lessons, lessons that were more about life than about basketball. Behind it was a series of old-fashioned, almost Calvinist values more and more at risk in the increasingly material culture of American sports, driven by the ever more predatory force of a new entertainment culture, in which money is presumed to buy anything, first and foremost loyalty.”
― David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made