Air Jordan
Sports Saturday
The Chicago Bulls, seemingly on the verge of making it through the first round of the NBA playoffs, have a player that is taking me back twenty years. That was when the greatest Chicago Bull of them all—and perhaps the greatest basketball player of them all—won his first championship. Second-year point guard Derrick Rose has a slashing style and a nonstop intensity that remind me of Michael Jordan.
I felt for the Indiana Pacers, who may be elminated by Rose’s team this afternoon. After all, they did everything right and (as their coach noted) should have won one or even two of the first three games. But they didn’t have a player with Rose’s brilliance.
Rose found holes where there were no holes and, like Jordan, knew when to go for the basket and when to draw the defense to him before passing off to a teammate for a wide open three. Even when Indiana managed to close him down, as they did in the third game, he nevertheless still made his mark. Late in the contest, at the top of the key, he somehow managed to explode through the entire Indiana defense to score the basket that put the Bulls ahead for good.
In honor of the man that he reminds me of, I went looking for a poem about Jordan. I came across, of all things, a sestina, which is a complex medieval verse form of six stanzas in which lines must end, not with rhymes, but with one of six words, whose order varies in each stanza. Then the poem ends with a three-line stanza (the envoi), each of whose lines must contain two of the words. The ordering goes as follows:
1st stanza 1 2 3 4 5 6
2nd stanza 6 1 5 2 4 3
3rd stanza 3 6 4 1 2 5
4th stanza 5 3 2 6 1 4
5th stanza 4 5 1 3 6 2
6th stanza 2 4 6 5 3 1
envoi 2–5 4–3 6–1
By capturing a player as unpredictable as Michael Jordan within a verse form as rigidly formatted as a sestina, poet Jay Spoon makes it appear that “his airness” operated according to the dictates of a higher law. Working within the rigid confines of the court to deposit a round ball within a small metal hoop 12 feet above the floor, Jordan made magic happen.
In the poem, Spoon is celebrating one of Jordan’s returns from retirement. Without him, the GAME dwindles to game. Capturing Jordan through an ancient verse form reenforces this message: when Jordan leaves the scene, classic basketball is no more. After this past week, however, Rose has us thinking that maybe, just maybe, some of the old magic is still there. Here’s the poem:
By Jay Spoon
The NBA wasn’t the same without Michael.
What was THE GAME
Became just a game.
I missed watching him in his hundred dollar shoes
Do his million dollar dunks
After pulling some of his million dollar moves.
Other people tried the same moves,
But they couldn’t make them as smoothly as Michael.
They tried to copy his dunks,
To make it more of a GAME.
Some of them even wore his shoes.
But without him it was always, only, a game.
It got boring just watching a game,
Even if there were a few good moves,
And someone was wearing some really nice shoes.
In their hearts the fans knew that without Michael,
There would never be another great GAME—
Just lay-ups and shots from outside, but no great dunks.
Sure, they all tried to do powerful dunks,
But they never made it more than a game.
The thing that would make it more of a GAME
Again were the magnificent moves
Of the fabulous Michael-—
With or without his hundred dollar shoes.
Some say it was the shoes,
And some say it was the dunks,
But all basketball fans loved to watch Michael.
Coaches don’t like coaching a game.
They want steals, dunks, exciting moves—
They want a GAME.
The only way it could ever be a GAME
Again is him, wearing his hundred dollar shoes,
Pulling his million dollar moves,
Then going up for his million dollar dunks.
Without him on the starting five it was an amateur’s game.
The playoffs, the steals, the fouls are nothing without Michael.
The plain truth is that before Michael there was no GAME.
It was just a predictable game played in boring shoes.
I’m relieved to have him back; I missed those dunks and moves.