NBA: The God of comebacks

The hype has been building all season. Slowly, though, like a simmering fire. And it reminds me that all of us anxiously awaiting the miraculous return of Michael Jordan to professional basketball aren’t much different from a rather more significant segment of the population: those who have been waiting two thousand years for the imminent return of Yahweh.

In fact, the fanatical enthusiasm at the rumored return of MJ is precisely like the passion of all religious devotees: they have visions of their own limited-edition deity returning to earth high upon a flaming cloud, waving a sword, a scythe, a book of truth. What are we doing, if not dreaming of MJ flying into our lives once more, cradling a round ball, hurtling toward the Holy Grail of Hoop, the Larry O’Brien Trophy. In the end, we are all just zealots, hoping for another glimpse of the divine.

In our case, the divine weighs 240 pounds and smokes cigars incessantly between meals, which are frequent and not bound by time. Unlike other Gods, ours keeps getting bigger and bigger. Or so it seems. After all, we only catch glimpses. Like other Gods, ours need not actually visit the chaotic universe that is the Washington Wizards, much as God need not tour the earth to remind himself what his mighty hand hath wrought. He can do this job from home.

But most Gods are jealous and, according to insider literature (Jordan Rules, The Old Testament), shamelessly egotistical. They hog the spotlight. They are obsessed with winning the admiration of people they don’t respect. They take particular pleasure in dismembering pagan opposition. And so on.

And so, saddled by buffets that won’t go away, overlord of a dysfunctional team of basketball pariahs, vagabonds and refugees, and watching a Game full of hip-hop heretics tattooing the rim with lyric-less shooting night after night, MJ sees the world is ripe for a resurrection. Indeed it is.

He claims he is practicing with the Wizards to lose weight. And Mohammed once claimed he could move a mountain by talking to it. Sometimes it’s hard to trust Gods and prophets. Speculators, however, perched like parasites on the husks of the MCI Center, suggest a more tantalizing scenario: Jordan drops the weight, dons Wizard white, and returns to the game with slim and trim Charles Barkley and an awesome free agent (Chris Webber? Michael Finley?) in tow.

This would be, for many junkies, the ultimate fix. Basketball nirvana. Buddha would’ve left the lotus position for tickets to this one. Jordan and his disciples would then, how can we say it, separate the wheat from the chaff, cleaning house throughout the league, leaving charmless chumps rapping songs of disbelief long into the lightless night.

I’m tempted to say that Jesus will reappear before that happens. But I hesitate. Why? Probably because of the innate lure of religion, the appeal of the impossible, that narcotic called fantasy. Or the American Dream.

But there are naysayers. I used to be one. I used to hope Jordan would stay retired, seal his storybook career in amber, let it be an immortal testament to the presence of glory in life. Yes, Jordan’s legacy seems to say, we humans can achieve greatness, can go out on our own terms, unravaged by the tentacles of fate. His legend admonishes us: Be Ye Perfect, as Your Master MJ in Retirement is Perfect.

Then I thought, what do I care if Michael Jordan comes back, makes a complete ass of himself and eventually staggers off in the direction of the horizon, beaten, broken, old? Whipped by the Iversons and Wallaces of the world. Where some would fault him for tarnishing—and not polishing—his legacy, I would laud the man for disregarding the paranoia of image management and simply doing what he wanted to do. At least, unlike most of us, he knows what he wants to do.

But maybe this is where I take leave of the faithless. They are forever petrified that their deity might be revealed as a mere mortal. Were MJ to come back, to escape the exile of middle-age retirement, that cruel purgatory, he might stumble, falter before the demanding gaze of acolytes, misfire on national television, go gray in the most public of forums. For many that would be only a little less devastating than God Himself materializing one day to tell us that we really are on our own.

Still, the zealots want him back, believing he’ll restore the glory of the game, believing he is immune to the touch of time. The rest only see risk. They see the flashing signposts of shame and embarrassment just around the bend. They see the sterling image of their flying dunkman corrupted by the revisions of age, coming ungraciously to earth. Faithless as they are, they have a point. Both sides do. Should we believe in Possibility and, with held breath, reach our hand into the cosmic candy jar one more time, or should we banish our fantasies, knowing that getting what you want sometimes means losing what you have? Should MJ shelve the storybook once and for all?

I say no. The hell with image. With the preservation of our perfect pictures from the past. Jordan ought to dance back onto the playground, gunning for glory, introducing a new spinner or fade to his repertoire, teasing destiny, shedding the burden of legend, laughing off the grim-faced concern for his "place in history." If, at worst, he reveals himself as an ordinary mortal and fails, he will only become more likable, more like us. But is that what we don't want to see?