Air Jordan

Matt Andrews tells the story of one of the greatest athletes of all time, Michael Jordan, and how his relationship with Nike changed the world of sports. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day University. Welcome,

(00:25):
and we're back on the untold history of sports in America.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Today we spotlight one of
the greatest athletes of all time, Michael Jeffrey Jordan's. He's
arguably the greatest basketball player of all time and was
one of the great icons of my childhood. Whether it

(00:46):
was drinking Gatorade or wearing Jordan's sneakers on your feet,
everyone wanted to be like Mike. Here's Matt to explain
how it all happened. Today, we're going to build off
our discussion of Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and race in
the NBA by exploring the next great star in the League,

(01:06):
of Michael Jordan's. So today is the story of this
revolutionary athlete and his relationship with one revolutionary fitness company.
Today is the story of Michael Jordan's and Nike. It's
the story of air Jordan's trademark. And I want to
do a few things today. I want to start by
telling you the general story of Michael Jordan. I want

(01:27):
to give you his athletic biography. But more importantly, I
want to place Michael Jordan in the context of race
relations in the United States. Where does Michael Jordan fit
in our discussion of sport and race in this country.
Jack Johnson climbed to the top of the pyramid and
he challenged assumptions of white supremacy in American sports. So

(01:47):
he changed the conversation with regard to race and sport
in the United States. Jackie Robinson desegregated American team sports,
and he changed the conversation. Muhammad Ali changed the conversation
with his outspokenness and rebelliousness. And today I'm going to
argue that Michael Jordan changed the conversation as well. So

(02:10):
part of what we're going to do today is explore
the racial meaning of Michael Jordan's But like I said,
I also want to place Jordan in the context of
a global marketing revolution. I want to talk about how
this kid from Wilmington, North Carolina, who played the sport
of basketball, how he became literally the most famous person
in the world. So that's a lot. So let's begin

(02:33):
by considering Michael Jordan's the athlete. Here are the very
basic facts. Michael Jeffrey Jordan was born in nineteen sixty
three in Brooklyn, New York, but he grew up in
North Carolina. And part of the legend of Michael Jordan's
is that he was a late bloomer. There is an
often told story that he was cut from his high

(02:54):
school basketball team, and I guess that's technically true. He
did not make the varsity squad as a sophomore, but
he did as a junior and a senior, so I
think that story is actually overblown a little bit. But
Jordan was not one of the nation's most celebrated high
school players um but coaches at the University of North
Carolina they saw Jordan's at some local basketball camps and

(03:17):
they were just flabbergacid with his athleticism, and they convinced
him to come to u n C, where he did
very well. In his freshman year at the University of
North Carolina, he hit the winning shot in the Night
two n c A title game. This was against Georgetown.
Jordan was an All American his next two years in college,

(03:39):
and then he skipped his senior year and he entered
the NBA Draft. This was in four where he was
selected third by the Chicago Bulls. There was a brief
detour to play for the USA basketball team in the
Summer Olympics in four I will remind you if this
was so. The Soviets weren't there because of the boycott,

(04:00):
and Jordan and the Americans won gold. And then Michael
Jordan goes to the NBA where he immediately becomes a star.
In his third game in the league, he scored thirty
seven points, and he was off and running or off
and jumping. Every game was a highlight reel. Every game

(04:21):
Michael Jordan's seemed to do something basketball fans had never
seen before. He was named the NBA's Rookie of the Year.
In his second season, Michael Jordan's Bulls met Larry Birds
far superior Boston Celtics. The Celtics would sweep the series,
but Jordan's was the best player on the court. In

(04:42):
the first two games at the Boston Garden, Jordan scored
forty nine and then sixty three points. After Game two,
Larry Bird said that wasn't Michael Jordan's on the court.
That was God disguised as Michael Jordan's. There are two
main phases to Michael Jordan's NBA career. The first phase

(05:05):
culminated with Jordan's leading the Chicago Bulls to three straight
NBA titles in the early nineteen nineties. But then Jordan's
shocked the sporting world by retiring from basketball to try
professional baseball. This was something he did right after the
murder of his father. His father was robbed and murdered

(05:26):
at a highway rest stop along the North Carolina South
Carolina border, and James Jordan's Michael Jordan's father, James Jordans,
had always wanted his son Michael to play baseball. James
Jordan was a black man from the Jackie Robinson era,
right baseball was the sport for black Americans of his generation,

(05:48):
and so to honor his father, Michael Jordan played minor
league baseball for a year. He did not do especially
well that he was not terrible, But then Michael Jordan
came back. He thrilled the sporting world by returning to
the NBA, and he won three more titles with the
Chicago Bulls, retiring yet again after that last championship. I

(06:13):
guess he did return briefly and played for the Washington Wizards.
Jordan was actually treated very badly in Washington, but we
will ignore that part of the story. Add it all
up from a basketball perspective, Michael Jordan is arguably the
greatest basketball player of all time. He won five NBA
Most Valuable Player Awards. Only Kareem Abdul Jabbar won more.

(06:36):
He won six. But as opposed to Kareem, who was
seen as the latest in a line of great NBA
big men, Michael Jordan's redefined our idea of what a
basketball player could be and do, and he redefined how
people thought about building a championship basketball team. Before Jordan's

(06:59):
NBA teams still thought that the key to a winning
team was having a dominant center of Bill Russell, A
Wilt Chamberlain a Kareem. But the two guys drafted before
Jordan four they were both centers. Magic and Bird were
starting to change this idea in the nineteen eighties, but
Michael Jordan's will change it once and for all. Jordan's

(07:23):
changed the entire architecture of the game. He changed how
people think about the game. It's with Michael Jordan that
the whole idea about how to build a successful basketball
team is transformed. To sum this part up, Jordan's basketball
greatness was the sum of three things. His incredible athleticism,

(07:44):
his unparalleled work ethic, and a competitive spirit that bordered
on the pathological. Michael Jordans hated to lose at anything.
He took great offense at even the smallest slight. But
every once in a while, an athlete comes along who
expands our notion of what is physically possible, and Michael

(08:07):
Jordan's was definitely one of those athletes. Okay, So we
have this story of Michael Jordan's amazing athletic and basketball talent,
his incredible will and drive, and just a purely sporting sense.
He was a revolutionary athlete. But the key to Michael
Jordan's transition from American basketball star to global icon is

(08:31):
his relationship with the American shoe company Nike. We talked
a little while ago about the New Strenuosity, the physical
fitness revolution that began in the late nineteen sixties and
then surged in the nineteen seventies and eighties. One of
the companies looking to capitalize on the New strenuosity was

(08:52):
a small Oregon shoe company called Nike. Nike was founded
in Oregon in the nineteen sixties by two people. One
was the University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman. He
was the guy who wrote that nineteen sixty seven book Jogging.
We we talked about him a little while ago. But
the entrepreneurial brains behind Nike was Phil Knight. Phil Knight

(09:17):
had been a distance runner at the University of Oregon,
coached by Bowerman, and then as a business student at Stanford,
he became consumed with the idea of selling a lighter,
more comfortable running shoe. So Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman
they created Blue Ribbon Sports. That was the name first,

(09:38):
and Phil Knight would travel to Japan and he would
bring Japanese running shoes back to Oregon, where he would
actually sell them out of the trunk of his car.
But then Knight and Bowerman had an idea for a
shoe of their own. They literally poured melted rubber into
a waffle maker, making a light rubber based waffle soul,

(10:01):
and they began making their shoes with these waffle souls,
and people started to buy these shoes. In nineteen seventy one,
they renamed the company Nike, after the Greek goddess of victory.
So if you are wearing Nikes, you are wearing shoes
named after a girl. Just pointing that out to all

(10:21):
the macho men out there. That same year, seventy one,
Phil Knight paid a college design student thirty five dollars
to create a logo for the company. She came up
with what soon became known as the swoosh, till Knight
told her, I don't love it, but maybe it will
grow on me. Now it is one of the world's

(10:43):
most recognized symbols. In the nineteen seventies, Nike enjoyed moderate success,
and they started making basketball shoes too, But Nike was
really just one shoe company among many. What Nike was
looking for was a transcendent athlete, an athlete who would

(11:04):
be a walk or running or maybe jumping billboard for
their shoes, and in the mid nineteen eighties, Michael Jordan
would end up being that athlete. The first pair of
shoes for this revolutionary athlete where themselves revolutionary. They were
red and black air Jordan's. The NBA had a rule

(11:26):
back then that a player's shoes had to match those
of his teammates in color, and the Chicago Bulls wore
shoes that had a white base. So the NBA told Jordan,
you cannot wear those colorful shoes. If you do, we
will find you five thousand dollars a game. Nike told
Jordan's where the shoes will pay the fines. This was

(11:48):
brilliant publicity. Next, they embarked on an ambitious and creative
marketing campaign for the shoes. This is a campaign that
featured the independent filmmaker Spike Lee. He asked the rhetorical question,
it's got to be the shoes. Nike sales sword in
the United States. Next, Nike went overseas, as did the NBA.

(12:13):
Because of the growth of satellite television and then fiber
optic cables that made the Worldwide Web possible, both the
NBA and Nike were able to advertise their products around
the globe. Europe was the first market that Nike in
the NBA went after. This was in the late nineteen eighties.
Then came Japan, and then came the mother of all markets, China,

(12:37):
where Jordan's Chicago Bulls were known as the Red Oxen.
There are over one billion people in China. By my calculation,
that's over two billion feet. That is a lot of Nikes,
and by the mid nineteen nineties Nike the company, they
were pulling in four billion in annual revenues, making a

(12:58):
net profit of six hundred million, and though long retired
from basketball, Michael Jordan's to this day he earns well
over one hundred million dollars a year in Nike revenue.
It was and continues to be an amazing business success
story a company and their transcendent athlete as pitchman. After

(13:24):
the break, Republicans were speakers too, doing what he did

(13:45):
and when he did it, playing transcendent basketball at the
dawn of the global media and advertising revolution. Michael Jordan's
he was just the perfect athlete at the perfect time,
and everyone loved him. White kids, black kids, brown kids, whatever,
boys and girls, they were all drawn to Jordan's. According

(14:08):
to the jingle of a Gatorade commercial, they all wanted
to be like Mike. Michael Jordan's is African American. If
we were going to define people by their race, that's
his race black. But looking at it from a wide
angle viewpoint of our course, Michael Jordan's is really the

(14:30):
first superstar black athlete who was able to construct a
public image of himself in which race was not a
central part of that image. To go back to the
athletes I mentioned at the beginning and athletes we've talked
about in this course in the turn of the century
white mind. Jack Johnson was the black menace. He was

(14:51):
White America's racial nightmare. Joe Lewis, who positioned himself as
the anti Jack Johnson, well, he was the brown Bomber,
a reference to the color of his skin. You could
never forget that. But you had to think of Jackie
Robinson in terms of his race. After all, that's the
burden of the Trailblazer. His race is why he was

(15:12):
so significant. There was Muhammad Ali who made race central
to his identity. He wanted everyone to know that he
was black and beautiful. And even Magic Johnson, who came
right before Jordan's and was for many years a contemporary
of Jordan's. Though Magic did not talk in terms of race,
there was always a racial aspect to Magic Johnson because

(15:36):
he was always being compared to Larry Bird and Larry
birds whiteness. I suppose one could argue that a guy
named O. J. Simpson did this to an extent. First,
Simpson was a charismatic California football player with a good
looks and a winning smile, and he moved into white neighborhoods.

(15:56):
He married a white woman, and he made commercials representing
big American companies like Hurtz Rehnakar. When he was in
college at Southern col in ninety eight, O J. Simpson
famously refused to align himself with Dr Harry Edwards and
the Revolt of the Black Athlete. He said he wanted
nothing to do with the racial identity politics of that era,

(16:20):
and certainly O J. Continued to think of himself as
having moved beyond the confines of any racial category. He
once famously responded to a reporter who asked him about
being black in America by saying, I'm not black, I'm
o J. But then, of course came his arrest in

(16:40):
for double murder. UH and o J lawyers. They framed
their entire defense a successful defense around the idea that
though he might be famous, he was just another black
man being harassed by the L A p D. With
O J, it ended up being all about race. So
I recognized that Jordan may not be the absolute first here,

(17:03):
but the argument that Jordan's by biographers and sports commentators
like to make about Jordan's is that his popularity was
so stratospheric, I mean so much more than O J's. Ever,
was that Michael Jordan's transcended race. And when people make
this argument about transcending race, they are not saying that
one looks at Jordan and can no longer tell if

(17:25):
he's black or white. You know, all I see is
gray whatever that means. It's not that. It's just that
race was not Jordan's primary marker of identity, which is
really saying something in the context of what we've been
talking about in this course, what asked to describe Michael
Jordan's Americans probably would not have started by saying that

(17:45):
he's a black basketball player. They just would say he's
an amazing basketball player. It would not have been about race.
Another way of defining Jordan's racial significance, he was a crossover.
He was an athlete who appealed to black and white Americans,
to all Americans. The color of his skin did not
limit his popularity with anyone. But there is an important

(18:11):
point to make here. One of the reasons that so
many Americans found Jordan's so compelling and so likable, one
of the reasons he was able, perhaps to transcend race,
if such a thing as possible, was that Michael Jordan's
consciously avoided political issues, especially political issues revolving around the

(18:31):
issue of race. This attitude was very famously exhibited in
when Michael Jordan was asked by his college coach U
n C. S. Dean Smith. He was asked to endorse
the Democrat who was running for the US Senate from
North Carolina, Harvey Gant. Gant was the mayor of Charlotte

(18:52):
and a longtime civil rights activist. Harvey Grant was African American,
and he was running against the Republican Jesse Helms, a
man who had been a vocal segregationist and someone who
many leaved had disdained for the African American community. So
Dean Smith, who was a principled and political person, he

(19:15):
asked Michael Jordan to take a stand and endorse Harvey
Gant against Jesse Helms, and Jordan refused when asked why not.
One of his biographers tells us that Jordan explained his
silence by saying, because Republicans buy sneakers too, and Michael
Jordan recently admitted that he did indeed make that statement, though,

(19:38):
though he says he was joking when he said it,
but let the record show. He also said he was
not interested in publicly endorsing Harvey Gant. Michael Jordan received
a lot of criticism for his silence, criticism for not
taking a stand on what many considered to be an
important issue in his home state, and criticized especially because

(20:00):
the reason he gave was that he did not want
to damage Nike sales. So as critics saw it, this
was an economic decision to be a political It was,
they said, a selfish decision not to endorse Scant. But
let me place this argument or disagreement in a timeline.

(20:24):
Michael Jordan's is of the post civil rights generation. You know,
he was born in nineteen sixty three, but he came
of age, so to speak, in the late seventies and
the early eighties. So he was not of the generation
of protests and marches, you know, integration fights, sit ins,
and Boycott's. He was of the next generation, a generation

(20:46):
that was poised to capitalize on the gains made by
the protest generation. And when I say capitalized, I suppose
I mean that in both the general sense and an
economic sense. This post Civil rights generation was very aware
of what had just happened. They were aware of the
struggles that black and Americans had been through, and for

(21:07):
some then, as they saw it, it was their duty
to live the American dream, to go as far as
they could, to make as much money as they could. Again,
it was almost their obligation to capitalize on the gains
that the previous generation had made. I mean, this is
what success means in America. But the other way of

(21:29):
thinking about it was to say that you had to
be true to those who came before you, You had
to be true to your elders, and never forget the
racial struggle, never forget what others had literally died for.
I think that those two ways of thinking, you know,
should you buy in or should you never sell out?
I think those two ways of thinking about the post

(21:50):
civil rights era, I think they framed the way that
people reacted to Michael Jordan's Jordan was involved in another controversy,
and it's a story I think worth telling as it's
maybe the second most a miss Olympic medal stand story
in American history. And second, of course Tommy Smith and

(22:10):
gian Carlos in X and so for that story. We
go to Barcelona, the city in which, if all goes
according to plan, I will retire in fifteen years. I
love Barcelona. The Barcelona Summer Olympics. They're notable for a
couple of reasons. First, the Cold War was over. The

(22:33):
Soviet Union disintegrated in the early nineteen nineties and was
now fourteen independent nations, so the American Soviet tensions that
had fueled the Games for half a century they were
now gone. But second, these Olympics are notable because they
saw the debut of professional athletes. For the Olympics. The

(22:53):
IOC voted to allow professionals to compete in all the
sports at the Olympics. Who actually not boxing that that
was one of the exceptions. And nowhere did the ending
of the amateur only rule change the competitions more than
in basketball. And this takes us to the phenomenon of
the Dream Team. The Dream Team was the name given

(23:14):
to the American NBA superstars who agreed to represent the
United States here in Barcelona. Among the Dream teamers were
Magic and Bird, and always together those two. Bird was
way past his prime and suffering from a very bad back.
He barely played. Magic was back from a brief retirement

(23:35):
brought on by the fact that he had HIV. There
was Michael Jordan's, the most famous person in the world,
and there was Charles Barkley, who, for my money, was
the most underrated player on the team. Barkley was an
amazing basketball player as well as the court jester and
spokesperson for this team. It was here in Barcelona that

(23:57):
Barkley provided US with one of the immortal lines in
modern American sport. The opening game for the US was
against the African nation of Angola, and a reporter asked
Charles Barkley what he knew about Angola. Berkley said, I
don't know nothing about Angola, but Angola is in trouble.

(24:17):
Truer words have never been spoken. Angola lost one and
sixteen and it wasn't even that close. And this was
how it went. All tournament. The Dream Team won their
games by an average of forty four points. They won
by thirty two in the final. The head coach Chuck

(24:38):
Daily he did not call a time out in the
entire tournament, never had to. The only moment of tension
came during the metal ceremony when Michael Jordan's staged a protest,
and his protests had nothing to do with politics. He
was not speaking out against racism or poverty and justice

(24:59):
or war. Michael Jordan's was protesting his sweatsuit speci typically.
He was objecting to the fact that the American team
was required to wear warmups that were manufactured by Reebok.
Jordan's was a Nike man, and he was the Nike man.
And when the United States Olympic Committee made it clear

(25:21):
that jordan had to wear the Reebok warmups if he
wanted to be on the metal stand, Jordan's strongly considered
boycotting the metal ceremony. In the end, a compromise a
solution was this. Michael Jordan took an American flag and
he draped it over his shoulder and down his hip,

(25:42):
and that flag covered the Reebok logo. Some thought that
this was an unpatriotic use of the flag, every bit
as unpatriotic, they said, as Smith and Carlos raising their
fists in others bemoan the fact that we had gone
from Smith and Carlos a principled stand against racial injustice

(26:07):
to a stand in the name of a massive corporation.
You know, this is what transcending race is all about
Critics said, then, who wants to transcend race? But for
some the fact that Jordan could amass such a fortune
and he was able to focus on his commercial brand,
this itself was a sign of progress. You know, some

(26:28):
people said Tommy Smith and John Carlos did that, so
Michael Jordan could do this. And I'll add to this
just a little bit. When we think about the phenomenon
of black power, we often tend to reduce it to that.
Things like that night snapshot of raised fists and protests
and raised fists was very much part of the black

(26:48):
power phenomenon. But black power advocates wanted that They were
demanded a piece of the pie. They wanted access to
the lucrative American economic system, and now Michael Jordan's had
that access in a big and so here he was
protecting his brand and thinking of it this way, this

(27:11):
moment in might also be seen as a statement of
black power. Michael Jordan's take When asked about this moment,
Jordan said this, The American dream is standing up for
what you believe in. And if I offended anyone, that's
too bad. In other words, I believe in Nike and

(27:32):
that's my right. And if you don't like it, well
I'm Michael Jordan's and you're not. That's all for now.
Next time on the Untold History of Sports in America,
presented by One Day University, Mia Hamm and the World
of Women's Soccer, School of Humans