Jordan, LeBron, and Jesus

Stephen A. Smith accidentally said something revealing in one of the endless televised debates about LeBron James and Michael Jordan over the last month: 

“As long as I’m living and breathing, and I’ve got breathe in my body, and I got a voice, and I got vocal cords, you will me hear say LeBron James is no Michael Jordan.”

To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a picture of the future of the NBA, imagine an Air Jordan stomping on the face of every great young player -- forever. The present must always pay homage to the past. Michael Jordan is the Greatest Of All Time. The discussion is over. He dominated the toughest era in league history. The NBA isn’t what it was. It will never be that way again. 

People like Stephen A. talk about him in the same way the Apostle John talks about Jesus. Replace a few words and this could be on First Take: 

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched -- this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. 

-- 1 John 1:1-4 

Someone who lived through Jordan’s prime knows that being greater than him is about much more than checking a few boxes. Stephen A. has said he doesn’t care if LeBron wins six or even seven championships. It still wouldn’t be enough. He’s not invincible. Not like MJ. 

The problem is that there are fewer and fewer people like him in a position to really understand that. The people who saw Jordan in the flesh are all getting older. They won’t always be around to tell us about him. 

Jordan vs. LeBron is basketball’s version of Jay Leno vs. Conan O’Brien. People cared about which comedian would host an irrelevant TV show because the two represented something more than themselves. Conan was a Generation Xer who waited his turn while the Baby Boomer hung onto the job well past when he should have retired. Leno was the Baby Boomer getting rushed out the door for a fresher face even though he was still on top of the game. 

Stephen A. (53) is four years younger than Jordan (57). When he’s talking about MJ, he’s really talking about himself. What happened in the 90s matters. He matters. It’s the cry of a man screaming into a void and hoping to hear breath in his lungs. 

The same thing is happening when Nick Wright (36) talks about LeBron (35). Wright was six when Jordan beat the Bad Boy Pistons. He missed that era of that NBA. But what happened in the 2010s matters too. Why are we so sure that the game was better 30 years ago? Just because the people who were around back then say so? 

LeBron, like so many other Millenials, is being judged by historical standards that aren’t relevant to his life. The league is different than in Jordan’s day. The rules are different. The two barely even play the same sport. No one is winning a title in 2020 running the Triangle Offense. Saying LeBron could never be as great as Jordan because he needed to team up with other stars is like saying a modern college student could never be as great as one from the 1960s because he needed to take out loans to pay his tuition. Times have changed. 

Jordan had his time. And that time is over and is never coming back. LeBron has his time now. It will end too. For all people are like grass, and their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers, and the flower fades. (Isaiah 40:6-8) 

There’s a reason few people bring up Wilt Chamberlain or Bill Russell in GOAT conversations anymore. Russell won his first NBA title in 1957. A 12-year old who watched that live would be 75 in 2020. Most of the people who watched with him are dead. A 12-year old who watched Jordan win his first title in 1991 is 41 in 2020. He might still think that Jordan is the GOAT when he’s 75 in 2054. Do you think people will still listen? Do you think they will still care? 

Calling anyone the GOAT at anything is fairly ridiculous. Who are any of us to say? Stephen A. is right in the sense that you can’t really judge something unless you saw it for yourself. Only a basketball fan who had watched the game faithfully since the 1950s is really qualified to speak on it. There aren’t many of those folks left. And I don’t see any of them on TV. The span of human history goes back thousands and thousands of years. No one was around for all of it. All we can really say is who was the greatest in a particular era. 

But that’s not enough. We don’t want to be confined to a particular era when making those judgments because we don’t want to think about lives being confined to a particular era. God has put a desire for eternity on the human heart. And yet we can never fulfill it. (Ecclesiastes 3:11) 

Art (and sport is a subsection of art) is an attempt to do so. People write songs and make movies for the same reason they drew animals on the walls of caves. It’s why Jay Z made a song called Young Forever. It’s why Martin Scorcese and Robert DeNiro made The Irishman. That’s a movie about a bunch of old men reliving the 1960s one last time, using digital effects to pretend that they are younger than they are, and trying to make the cultural figures from their youth relevant to a modern audience. But Jimmy Hoffa doesn’t matter to anyone not in the AARP. And, if we’re being honest, neither does JFK. 

Soon enough, no one will care that this country ever existed. Americans have trouble grappling with our societal mortality because we are raised to believe that the United States is the culmination of history. Everything built toward the moment where the Founding Fathers founded a republic on the idea that all men are created equal and deserved the chance to rule themselves. That dream must never die. But, of course, it will. Nothing lasts forever. 

We think that the end of the U.S. means the end of the world when really it is just the end of our world. There’s a lot of talk about how the future of our democracy is at stake in this election. Maybe that’s true. But our democracy was always going to end one day. Life will go on. The world will keep spinning. People will still be born, fall in love, have kids, get old, and die. Oceans rise and empires fall. Nothing ever really changes. There is nothing new under the sun. 

There is only one name that will last forever and it’s not Michael Jordan. And there’s only one idea that will last forever and it’s not The American Dream. There’s a through line running through human history that you can find if you have eyes to see: 

But as I consider this shifting and odd variety of customs and beliefs in different ages, I find in one corner of the world a peculiar people, separated from all other peoples of the earth, who are the most ancient of all and whose history is earlier by several centuries than the oldest histories we have. 

I find this great and numerous people descended from one man, worshipping one God, and living according to a law which they claim to have received from his hand. They maintain that they are the only people in the world to whom God has revealed his mysteries; that all men are corrupt and in disgrace with God, that they have all been abandoned to their senses and their own minds; and that this is the reason for the strange aberrations and continual changes of religions and customs among them, whereas these people remain unshakeable in their conduct; but that God will not leave the other peoples forever in darkness, that a Redeemer will come, for all; that they are in the world to proclaim him to men; that they have been expressly created to be the forerunners and heralds of this great coming, and to call all peoples to unite with them in looking forward to this Redeemer. 

-- Blaine Pascal