Face-to-Face: Michael Jordan portrait

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David C. Ward: This is a small crowd. Let me just introduce myself, in fact, you can introduce yourself to me since we have a small crowd.

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David C. Ward: I'm David Ward, and historian at the National Portrait Gallery, curating, right now, this show on the second floor, 'Hide & Seek'.

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David C. Ward: Um, and so I'm getting away from that by doing sports,

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David C. Ward: and Michael Jordan — one of the iconic figures of the last quarter century in American Popular culture.

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David C. Ward: And if we step down to the picture, I'll talk a little bit about that, a little bit about Nike, a little bit about William Blake, the poet.

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[SILENCE]

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David C. Ward: I'll give you a little bit of background on this.

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David C. Ward: The National Portrait Gallery was shut from 2000 to 2006.

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David C. Ward: For those of you who have had any contracting done on your house, you know that any construction plan takes about twice as long as we planned.

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David C. Ward: We totally renovated the building, but we also did - and this is the product of it -

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David C. Ward: is that we totally renovated our ideas about portraiture, that we modernized everything.

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David C. Ward: That, instead of seeing a kinda of stuffy old oil painting museum with

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David C. Ward: the cliche of a sort of middle-aged men with tweed jackets,

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David C. Ward: we wanted to explore the art of portrayal. We wanted to really dramatically broaden the notion of who we portrayed in the galleries.

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David C. Ward: So what we did here for our entry room is, we have both Americans now and portraiture now.

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David C. Ward: This allows us to collect essentially contemporary Americans, people who have made an impact on American society in our own time,

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David C. Ward: um, and also different elements of portrayal and different elements of portraiture.

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David C. Ward: So you'll see here everything from kinda fine art photography, to this, 'Michael Jordan', represented in a Nike ad.

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David C. Ward: We're expanding the notion of portrayal and portrait, away from just the totally fine art.

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David C. Ward: And this is an early, mid-- just after Michael signs his contract with the Chicago Bulls.

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David C. Ward: You can tell in part, cause he still has a little bit of hair.

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David C. Ward: And I realized, that if I was just a little less of a technophobe,

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David C. Ward: is that what I should have done is download a lot of Michael Jordan dunking and shooting and winning games on my iPad, and just play it,

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David C. Ward: because there is an element of, kind of, the ridiculous here;

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David C. Ward: that you have a transcendent athlete, a transcendent figure, who expresses himself through bodily movement

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David C. Ward: and athletic competition, and I am going to talk about him.

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David C. Ward: So there's this element where you can't really get that close to him.

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David C. Ward: You have this-- we have this same problem if you're dealing with musicians or dancers.

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David C. Ward: Michael Jeffrey Jordan, born actually in Brooklyn, New York, moved to North Carolina when he was 12.

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David C. Ward: Famously, he did not make the varsity basketball team in his high school as a sophomore.

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David C. Ward: And this is that kinda founding myth that a lot of people like, which indicates that people, your character, your destiny isn't set with an early age.

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David C. Ward: It is an equivalent myth, or it actually is a myth, that Albert Einstein failed algebra when he was in high school,

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David C. Ward: which turns out not to be true. Einstein failed French.

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David C. Ward: But, Michael Jordan did not make the varsity team as a sophomore, but what people-- what happened was, over that summer he grew 4 inches,

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David C. Ward: worked really hard, and made the varsity team the following year.

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David C. Ward: Um, played in North Carolina, got a scholarship to North Carolina,

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David C. Ward: matriculated under Dean Smith, a legendary coach, and won a national title there. Becomes player of the year,

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David C. Ward: wins the championship game against Georgetown, by hitting that 15 foot J which, if I had my iPad, I would be able, now, to show you, but I don't.

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David C. Ward: Um, and goes on to be drafted number 3 in the NBA draft,

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David C. Ward: and of course, that is the famous draft which Portland, Oregon rues to this day, with Hakeem Olajuwon being drafted number one,

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David C. Ward: which is a defensible choice, and Portland taking the poor old Sam Bowie out of Kentucky at number 2,

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David C. Ward: despite the fact that he had repeated stress fractures in both legs and could barely walk, like Fred Sanford in Sanford and Sons. Not a good move.

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David C. Ward: And Michael Jordan, who everybody was circling to get, falls to Chicago at number 3,

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David C. Ward: thereby setting a pattern for a dynasty in the middle West and heartbreak in Portland,

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David C. Ward: which, by the way, as an historian, I have to just parenthetically say,

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David C. Ward: Portland then repeated that mistake by drafting Greg Oden out of Ohio State despite repeated leg problems, as if they had never learned from this.

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David C. Ward: Again, the lesson is you don't learn from history.

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David C. Ward: And I really wonder what they were thinking if they could have taken Kevin Durant, but I digress.

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David C. Ward: Jordan actually, again like the element of sort of slow gestation and the idea that he doesn't get,

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David C. Ward: um, he doesn't make his high school team. It takes him seven years, and we frequently forget this, to win an NBA title.

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David C. Ward: He comes into the league. He's immediately incandescent. He averages almost 30 points a year.

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David C. Ward: His rookie season, which leads to the famous joke from North Carolina about, "Who is the only man who could hold Michael Jordan under 20 points a game,"

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David C. Ward: and the answer, of course, is Dean Smith.

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David C. Ward: Because Dean Smith, the coach, ran a pattern offense. Most famously, when I grow up, before the shot clock, Dean Smith would run the four corners

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David C. Ward: in the famous game against Duke, which the halftime score was 6-4.

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David C. Ward: So that element of over coaching blighted, or at least trained Michael Jordan to the art of team play,

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David C. Ward: which he then forgot about promptly when being coached by Doug Collins and a variety of early coaches at Chicago,

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David C. Ward: which were not successful. Ran into the Pistons bad boys um, that famous agglomeration of Isaiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer;

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David C. Ward: not my favorite team as an NBA devotee.

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David C. Ward: But they're the roadblock that Jordan has to come through.

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David C. Ward: The fashioning of the Jordan rules, which essentially pushes him to the side double teams in running through- through screens.

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David C. Ward: And all the rest of that, until finally Doug Collins is still coaching in the league, and

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David C. Ward: I guess that's good for him, but he-- he ruined the wizards, and wasn't particularly good.

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David C. Ward: And Phil Jackson comes in the coach Chicago, and what Jackson does is institute the triangle offense, in which all the offense has to go through Michael Jordan,

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David C. Ward: making him, in effect, a team Player.

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David C. Ward: That he doesn't rely on a supporting cast that included people at one point like Dennis Hopson; forgotten NBA player,

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David C. Ward: but by making Jordan essentially the port-- point forward

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David C. Ward: and surrounding him with a talented cast, including Charles Oakley, and ultimately Scottie Pippen, the-- the quintessential NBA wingman.

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David C. Ward: They enter the famous period of the 2 threepeats, three NBA championships in a row,

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David C. Ward: interrupted by Michael Jordan's sudden, almost inexplicable, retirement in '93, after that season,

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David C. Ward: and then what happens is that he retires to play baseball.

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David C. Ward: The tragedy that occurs, of course, is that Michael Jordan's dad is murdered on a roadside,

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David C. Ward: almost drive-by murder when he's changing a tire in Lumberton, North Carolina and is murdered by two guys,

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David C. Ward: and this as you'd expect is devastating.

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David C. Ward: Jordan retires to play baseball. There is a theory propagated by Bill Simmons, sports guy for ESPN,

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David C. Ward: that, in fact, David Stern secretly suspended Michael Jordan for gambling, but, um,

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David C. Ward: wasn't willing to announce it in public and so he told him to go play baseball for 18 months and then he could come back.

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David C. Ward: I'm not sure that the theory is true.

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David C. Ward: But it gives a kind of nice, uh, a kind of almost conspiratorial state of life;

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David C. Ward: state of the news media attitude towards what was, in many ways, a difficult decision.

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David C. Ward: Jordan, of course, goes to the Birmingham Barons, plays baseball, is not very successful, which gives baseball fans a tremendous degree of satisfaction

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David C. Ward: that this quintessential athlete is unable to hit a baseball, is what baseball devotees want to know.

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David C. Ward: A couple years-- 18 months later, Michael announces the famous two-word announcement "I'm back!"

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David C. Ward: He comes back, not having played basketball in 18 months, scores 19 points in his return,

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David C. Ward: scores 55 points the famous double nickel game at Madison Square Garden a couple of weeks later.

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David C. Ward: My brother was at that game, and said that it was absolutely unbelievable.

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David C. Ward: Knicks then actually were good; they're not any good anymore, but they were-- and Jordan just blew them down.

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David C. Ward: Um-- and so what you do with Michael Jordan? The problem with him is that you pile up statistics that eventually become almost meaningless,

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David C. Ward: because they're so incredible.

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David C. Ward: Uh, averages 30 points, 6 rebounds, 5 assists throughout his career, um, 6 NBA championships, 5 MVPs.

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David C. Ward: He only wins 5 MVPs because people get bored voting for him.

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David C. Ward: His good buddy Charles Barkley wins an MVP, mostly 'cause people just were tired and they figured, "Well, Chuck never won anything, we'll give him the MVP,"

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David C. Ward: and everybody likes Chuck, even Jordan liked him,

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David C. Ward: but you just kinda give it to him because it's just too easy, because he made everything look too easy, and that's where, over and above the numbers,

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David C. Ward: and this is where I wish I did have my iPad or a TV monitor.

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David C. Ward: That we think of Michael Jordan, we don't think about the numbers, we think about the incredible moments,

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David C. Ward: the ones that we see in the Nike commercials or the NBA ads or Sports Century classics on ESPN,

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David C. Ward: the famous basket against the Lakers in which he drives the lane, switches the ball mid-hand, you know, seems to hang in the air, goes right to left hand and flips it up and in.

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David C. Ward: I won't do my Marv Albert imitation here cause it's really terrible, but there's a whole series of those kind of-- of those kind of moves.

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David C. Ward: The fantastic dunk against the Knicks where he goes to the corner, gets-- makes a jab step to the corner, immediately reverses and jams it in over Patrick Ewing, as if he was a midget.

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David C. Ward: Uhm. It's unbelievable these these moments. The famous six three pointers in the first quarter of one playoff game

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David C. Ward: in which he-- where he's just gunning down; I think it's Utah,

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David C. Ward: and at the end he runs by Marv Albert and the boys in the-- in the-- and he's like this as he's running down court, 'cause even he can't believe how he's doing it.

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David C. Ward: And then finally, of course, and this is-- this, for a Washingtonian, this now gets me into difficult territory,

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David C. Ward: because the final moment in his career is the-- is the winning-- winning play against Utah, at Utah.

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David C. Ward: umm, in which he strips the ball from Karl Malone who always manage to lose the ball at big moments,

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David C. Ward: so I don't like Karl, but okay.

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David C. Ward: So he strips the ball from Karl Malone, and there's a famous shot in Sports Illustrated in which he goes up for the winning jumper,

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David C. Ward: and you can see in the crowd everybody because of high tech, high definition camera,

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David C. Ward: everybody in the crowd as he is going up for the jumper little bit at the top of the key, and everybody in the background is like this,

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David C. Ward: 'cause they know exactly what's gonna happen, and of course the famous one which basically I have to bring it up

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David C. Ward: because it must've destroyed his life; he should've moved to France and changed his name.

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David C. Ward: The famous shot on Ehlo, the-- the Marv Albert's call when Jordan wins the game against the Cleveland Cavaliers where Craig Ehlo is trying to guard him,

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David C. Ward: and he's actually doing a pretty good job, and Jordan just rises up and keeps rising and Ehlo, he hits the basket,

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David C. Ward: and Ehlo just falls to the ground, they lose the game, and that just, I mean, that just basically destroys him.

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David C. Ward: And that gets to the other point; it's that there's nobody being in this, in terms of the elements of athletics;

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David C. Ward: the elements by which people have certain talents and somehow are able to rise to a kind of transcendent almost ethereal category

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David C. Ward: tha-- that you can-- that, it's very hard to imagine there very few people who can do that, I think. I don't know,

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David C. Ward: to pull someone out of a hat, sort of like Pelé and soccer.

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David C. Ward: Others burden Magic when they were at their best, but they were sort of partners. Jordan really stood alone.

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David C. Ward: He's-- he's undoubtedly, you know, or almost by unanimous consent, the greatest basketball player of all time.

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David C. Ward: When I was a kid, of course, GOAT meant that you were, you were the person who caused the problem.

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David C. Ward: But GOAT - first with Muhammad Ali, another transcendent figure, I should have mentioned - GOAT now means greatest of all time.

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David C. Ward: Ali has a book about him called "The GOAT," which I didn't understand for a while, and Jordan, of course, is the same thing.

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David C. Ward: And with Jordan, there's that will to win, and this where you get to that uncomfortable element for him which is, that he's a-- he's a figure,

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David C. Ward: if you think about it, that we never know. We don't know anything about Michael Jordan.

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David C. Ward: Americans, the way they've dealt with sports stars, the y'know, the Bill Ar-- 'The All American Boy'.

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David C. Ward: Where I was growing up, I lived in Southern New Jersey. Bill Bradley was at Princeton, and there was a whole mythology,

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David C. Ward: y'know', Bill Bradley going to class or other people, y'know, even magic Johnson with the infectious smile and Michigan State and Larry Bird, 'The Hick from French Lick'

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David C. Ward: There was a whole narrative to them and Jordan kept himself absolutely isolated, almost- it- we- he never let you in,

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David C. Ward: and he never let-- Also, I think a lot of the people that he played with

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David C. Ward: in, in the sense, that he was not gonna be diverted from being a stone cold killer on the basketball court,

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David C. Ward: and that defines his greatness, and I think, to some extent, it also defines a kind of a limitation,

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David C. Ward: which I certainly think he doesn't care about, which is that he didn't-- he gives the impression of inviolability of invulnerability, that-- that

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David C. Ward: that nothing could touch him. And, of course, on the court, nothing could touch him.

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David C. Ward: I mean, what he wanted to do, he did. There's the famous-- the famous instances

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David C. Ward: of his competitiveness where the Bulls, at one of there training camps, had a ping-pong table, and he got beat by somebody like Steve Kerr,

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David C. Ward: and Jordan went out and bought a ping pong table and got some Chinese guy to teach him Ping-pong,

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David C. Ward: and he beat the hell out of everybody until they finally got rid of the ping-pong table, 'cause they couldn't play with him anymore.

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David C. Ward: The same sort of thing; he wins two Olympic gold medals. The famous anecdote at one point, the first Dream Team, they're scrimmaging, or playing against,

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David C. Ward: a college team, and some college kid, I can't remember who it is, was.

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David C. Ward: Actually, it was Allan Houston-- Allan Houston, who still in college and doing pretty well, was kind of being a little chesty about it,

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David C. Ward: and the next day, they come out and Jordan points out Houston and says, "I got him," and Houston didn't even get a dribble off, let alone a shot for the next two hours.

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David C. Ward: And that element here of ultimate competitiveness, which also then, and this was his problem, till, actually, Phil Jackson manages to manage this;

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David C. Ward: the instance during one of the finals where Jordan is breaking the triangle and other people are open, and

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David C. Ward: Jackson says, "Who else is open?" and he points to John Paxson, and Paxson hits the winning shot in that particular game or series.

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David C. Ward: That element of making Jordan feel with other people, and for a Washingtonian, we finally get the number one draft pick,

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David C. Ward: Michael Jordan comes out of retirement and is signed with the Wizards in what turned out to be a kinda misbegotten failure in a--

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David C. Ward: I'm a big basketball fan and I put up with 30 years of bad basketball in Washington D.C., and I'm not very happy about it,

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David C. Ward: so we finally get the number 1 pick, and Michael Jordan, in the new regime, picks Kwame Brown, who,

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David C. Ward: to be fair to him, although he's now a bust, was the consensus number 1 pick.

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David C. Ward: And whether he would have been great in another regime or not, I don't know, but what does seem to have happened was is the General Manager and the player coming out of retirement

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David C. Ward: Michael Jordan just destroyed his confidence. There's a famous story of Michael Jordan scrimmaging

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David C. Ward: and playing 1-on-1 with Tommy Brown in which Jordan just crushes his ego,

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David C. Ward: and the element here, where Jordan would not allow these other people the space to grow,

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David C. Ward: that, and it'll be interesting to see how he does as an entrepreneur and now the owner of the Charlotte Bobcats.

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David C. Ward: 'Cause that gets to the next level here, in terms of this, in terms of what we do know about Jordan, and I don't know if they're connected, but Michael Jordan

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David C. Ward: really is responsible for a major sector, I mean, I know we all have disposable income that goes to leisure,

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David C. Ward: but the element by which the American sporting goods apparel fashion industry takes off,

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David C. Ward: and particularly the success of Nike is due, in no small measure, to Michael Jordan.

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David C. Ward: Michael Jordan famously almost signed with Reebok when he had his first shoe deal out of college,

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David C. Ward: and they man-- Nike managed to convince him that they would design a shoe around him, and the Air Jordan

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David C. Ward: is one of the iconic brands in American manufacturing, sporting, cultural history.

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David C. Ward: And ever year, the new Air Jordan, the design elements, the whole thing-- When I was again growing up, we had those, y' know,

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David C. Ward: now only hipsters wear them: the Chuck Taylor, the Converse All Stars.

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David C. Ward: Adidas introduced a leather sneaker, and then the other manufacturers, but

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David C. Ward: the Air Jordan was the quintessential, must have shoe.

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David C. Ward: Every year, like the new high performance car, it was what you had to get.

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David C. Ward: And that really fueled Nike when he signed with them; was in the doldrums.

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David C. Ward: Reebok was the up and coming brand, and as soon as Jordan was putting on those iconic red, black, and white first generation Air Jordan's,

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David C. Ward: they become The Brand.

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David C. Ward: Nike prospers and turns into the rather rapacious, athletic, juggernaut that it is still today.

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David C. Ward: Jordan never really lets anybody in and-- and I hope that he-- Again we want our superstars

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David C. Ward: to be accessible. We want them in some way to be people we can relate to.

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David C. Ward: We try in many ways to humanize them. We try in many ways to get inside their skulls, to feel that we know them as fans.

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David C. Ward: And of course, a lot of that is fiction, a lot of that has to do with the distance between ourselves as ordinary, however talented, citizens and then these superstars.

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David C. Ward: The element of corporate intersection with that, where the brand becomes more important then the personality, has I think, accelerated that sense of distance. You no longer have someone like

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David C. Ward: Willy Mays playing stick ball in Harlem, or any of those kind of things where you could walk around and just see some of those people, there's a branding opportunity that

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David C. Ward: you see that in many ways isolates people even further.

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David C. Ward: But at his heart, at the heart of his character, what makes him great, it also what makes him slightly terrifying,

00:18:53.000 --> 00:18:55.000
David C. Ward: is Michael Jordan's incredible will to win.

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David C. Ward: What I remember about him, having watched most of his career, and and I played basketball until I stopped growing

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David C. Ward: or at least stopped getting taller, is that he had the fastest ju-- spin on his Jump Shot that I've ever seen. Most jump shots, they go up on the ball, rotates r--

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David C. Ward: When Michael Jordan took a jump shot, that the ball-- he torqued that ball so it almost seemed to fizz out of his hand.

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David C. Ward: This act of direction, this act of physical force in which he's controlling a basketball,

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David C. Ward: throwing it through the rim. More than his dunks, to me, the dunk competition; it was-- I would watch him make that 15 footer; the shot that he made to beat Georgetown; and it was-- and you would just--

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David C. Ward: even through the TV, you would almost seem to fizz with the sense of his investment physically and his

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David C. Ward: transfer of his power to that ball, y'know. It sounds factious to wish-- to hope that he's happy.

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David C. Ward: He's a young man. And what I-- what bothers me is that I thought about this talk and dealing with him, is that the statistics, which have actually become meaningless.

00:19:59.000 --> 00:20:09.000
David C. Ward: There's his career, the marketing, even in the Hanes underwear commercials, he is a kind of alienating presence which is a little bit off putting,

00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:15.000
David C. Ward: playing as the kind of the superstar, that to be blunt about it, white people are trying to get close to.

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David C. Ward: There's an element there that's a little bit uncomfortable to me.

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David C. Ward: But then, most of all the things that I thought was a little bit of a tell-tale,

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David C. Ward: um, his acceptance speech at the Basketball Hall of Fame last year, which he, I don't know what advice he got,

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David C. Ward: or what element went into it, but he used it as the opportunity; maybe he thought he was being funny, maybe he misjudged things,

00:20:39.000 --> 00:20:48.000
SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"} but it really was a very uncomfortable moment where he settled a lot of scores, in which there was making fun of,

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David C. Ward: yet again, of Jerry Rhinesdorf, the rather overweight general manager of the Bulls,

00:20:53.000 --> 00:21:02.000
David C. Ward: or other players in essentially this element of almost willful distancing; that you have somebody, and it's understandable why he would do it.

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David C. Ward: I mean I understand the urge, the urge to settle scores.

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David C. Ward: Your dad is killed; you go through a very public divorce, that at the time,

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David C. Ward: the largest divorce settlement in sort of commoner history; a non-royal divorce.

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David C. Ward: The sense that you're always at the center of attention; the sense that the paparazzi are always there; the sense that you're always being put upon;

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David C. Ward: you're always demands on your time; your being eaten alive by fame. But it was a remarkably ungracious moment,

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David C. Ward: and I hope that in some ways, whatever he does, however he does it,

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David C. Ward: that he recaptures in his own life, and this is a again a fatuous expectation on the part of somebody who will never meet him,

00:21:47.000 --> 00:21:55.296
David C. Ward: is that he finds and recaptures in his own life some of the grace that he brought to the basketball court. Thank you.