So what if he bought a basketball team? He's still a chump.
You can forgive Michael Jordan for refusing to take a stand on anything more controversial than his favorite Gatorade flavor, but not I.
Why not? Because during the time when he was the world's most famous athlete, when he could have used his celebrity status to tear down walls that needed to come down and build those that needed to go up, he was content to sell shoes. Now, as the only black owner of an NBA team, the Charlotte Bobcats, he has a chance to atone for his conspicuous and cultivated irrelevancy.
Don't bet on it, though. The most significant and unforgettable comments to ever proceed from his mouth were "Republicans buy sneakers, too" and "We feel this is going to help everyone, not just one race."
Those comments -- made, respectively, when Harvey Gantt's campaign tried to enlist Jordan's help during Gantt's 1990 Senate run against Jesse Helms and a couple of years later when proponents of a black cultural center at the University of North Carolina sought a financial or even moral contribution from him for the then-proposed building -- should be his epitaphs.
Gantt, reached this week, defended His Errness, saying "Michael's taken a beating for that statement. ... I'm not going to put a lot of blame on him for that. He was what -- in his 20s?"
Late 20s, but that's old enough to know better. Later, hundreds of UNC students, many of them athletes in their teens, put their educations on the line in 1992 by confronting the university president about the need for a free-standing repository for black studies on campus. Jordan turned down their request for help saying he didn't want to help "just one group."
But it's your group, man! Can you imagine a Jewish celebrity or one of any other ethnicity refusing to support a cause for the reason Jordan gave for spurning the Sonya Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History?
No, you can't.
Jordan's fans will no doubt rain down calumny upon me for pointing out that, as Gertrude Stein said about the city of Oakland, there's no there there. So far, he is just a jock who managed to parlay his mind-numbingly adroit skill at being inoffensive into business success.
Jordan, sadly, is not unique among blacks of a certain generation who think their success was achieved solely by their own pluck and who thus feel no debt to the generations that came before them or that will come after. Where other ethnic groups encourage their young people to "never forget" the hard row they've had to hoe to achieve success, too many of ours adopt a "never remember" attitude.
Jordan had no peer -- until Tiger -- at persuading millions to wear the same shoes, eat the same burgers, possibly even wear the same drawers as he. Wouldn't it be cool if he redeemed himself by using his influence as the Bobcats' owner to persuade millions of his generation to stand for something other than making money?
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