#CavsRank Villains: No. 2, Michael Jordan

Today we celebrate denigrate the No. 2 Cavs villain in history: Michael Jeffrey Jordan. Nate Smith, EvilGenius, and Robert Attenweiler all shared their thoughts on what made “His Airness” the penultimate villain to Cavs fans.

Nate Smith:

What makes a villain? A villain can be someone truly evil and malicious, but that use is rare. Usually a villain is a fictional device, an exaggerated character “devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel; or a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot.” In the realm of sports as theater, Michael Jordan was invariably the hero or the villain, depending on who you were rooting for. Jordan’s villainy was especially heartbreaking for Cavs fans. The physical incarnation of evil agency, Jordan embodied the spirit of his age.  Just like Gordon Gecko, Mark McGwire, and Donald Trump, the lines of hero and villain blurred with Jordan.

Jordan was and remains a ruthless competitor in every aspect of his life. Even yesterday, Jay Williams was telling stories about how players would lose $100,000 to Jordan in games of Paper/Rock/Scissors. Jordan was notoriously cruel to his teammates at times, as Wright Thompson wrote for ESPN in 2013.

He can be a breathtaking asshole: self-centered, bullying and cruel. That’s the ugly side of greatness. He’s a killer, in the Darwinian sense of the word, immediately sensing and attacking someone’s weakest spot. He’d moo like a cow when the overweight general manager of the Bulls, Jerry Krause, would get onto the team bus. When the Bulls traded for the injury-prone Bill Cartwright, Jordan teased him as Medical Bill, and he once punched Will Perdue during practice. He punched Steve Kerr too, and who knows how many other people.

Ebony’s Damon Young went further, in his piece Five Reasons Not to Be Like Mike: denigrating his Airness for his indifferent attitude towards his insanely priced sneakers, and their effect on the inner city; pointing out Jordan’s hypocrisy in his stances on the split of revenues when he was a player versus when he was an owner (I don’t see it as hypocrisy as much as unprincipled selfishness); and finally, reminding us that Jordan just wasn’t (and maybe still isn’t) a “good” person.

Nothing about Michael Jordan — his legendary cruelty and ability to hold petty grudges, his mean streak, his addiction to gambling, his infidelity, his Hitler mustache — suggests that he’d fit any definition of the word “good.”

Yes, Jordan has his personality flaws, and Damon Young stops short of naming them all.  DeadEndSports.com didn’t, though, adding the destroyed NBA careers of Muggsy Bogues, Rodney McCray, and Kwame Brown to Jordan’s victim list. Elin Nordegren even claims her marriage to Tiger Woods was the victim of Jordan’s womanizing ways. More than one urban legend exists about how Jordan’s gambling was so bad that his “retirement” to play baseball was really a secret suspension by David Stern. And, let’s not even talk about the most self-serving Hall-of-Fame induction speech in sports history.

Jordan was probably a bully, a jerk, a womanizer, and a degenerate gambler, but he wasn’t a criminal, he wasn’t Pol Pot, and he did a lot of work for charity too. Jordan may not have been “good” but he certainly wasn’t objectively evil. And, for all his faults, Jordan represents something that Americans love: a winner. The “win at any cost” mentality Jordan exhibited has always been revered, and in the 1990s, Jordan was the physical embodiment of that ideal. “History belongs to the victors,” it’s been famously said, and Jordan was a victor everywhere: on the court, on television, in the boardroom, even in the bedroom.

And on the court, no team was more consistently the victim of Jordan’s “winning” than the Cleveland Cavaliers. Between 1988 and 1993, Jordan and his Bulls knocked the Cavs out of the playoffs four times. Jordan’s lines in those games were the stuff of legend.

MJ defeated the Cavs time and again. His career high of 69 points came in an overtime game in Richfield in March of 1990. And we all know Game 5 of the first round of the 1989 playoffs: 44 points, nine rebounds, six assists, and “The Shot” over Craig Ehlo. As the chart above shows, amazing games against the Cavs were routine for Jordan, especially in the playoffs. Weighing it all, was Jordan a “Bad Guy?” Yes – especially if you were a Cavs fan.

Jordan’s rise came at the expense of Cleveland, and Jordan represented a new world that was leaving Cleveland behind: a world dominated by global manufacturing, big markets, slick advertising, multinational brands, and a win at any cost mentality. Michael Jordan was the embodiment of cultural iconography, a movement which didn’t embrace regionalism or uniqueness. Air Jordan was all about global brand conformity, and Cleveland was far too provincial to stop him, on the court or off. That the iconic moment of Jordan’s career came against the Cavs seems a cruel turn of the screw. It changed the course of Jordan and Cleveland history. The bad guy won. For many of us, it awakened us to the fact that TV had lied to us. Bad guys win, a lot. And everyone outside of Cleveland turned MJ into the good guy, and we’ve had to watch it, repeated at Cleveland’s expense, for decades now.

EvilGenius:

For much of this classic 1992 Gatorade commercial, there’s a fundamental aspirational quality that exudes like sweat from MJ’s pores of greatness. Shots of kids on playgrounds trying desperately to harness even a minuscule amount of His Airness’ abilities are intercut with actual game footage of Jordan pulling off his greatest moments on the hardwood. There are even overtly intentional attempts to make Michael seem just like one of the rest of us hopelessly earthbound humans. He plays keep away with kids, he gets all goofy in a “practice” against regular dudes in a gym. Heck, MJ is really just “Mike” in real life… he misses the ball, he laughs, he drinks Gatorade. You can do it too… you can “Be Like Mike!”

And then, just when you’re feeling all warm and fuzzy towards “Mike” is when the bottom drops out, and MJ defies gravity, logic, a talented Cavalier team, an arena full of disbelieving Cleveland fans, and most importantly the long arm of Craig Ehlo to sink what has forever become known as “The Shot.” Sure, he tries to preserve the illusion with a cut back for a quasi-innocent shrug and smirk to the camera in his “regular dudes gym at the local rec center” as he finishes a sip of his normal person Gatorade (in the original “But that’s none of my business…” pose). But there’s no disguising it any longer… Michael Jordan is better than you… he’s better than your whole team… there’s no possible chance that he is merely mortal… and one does not just get to “Be Like Mike.”

We were all those kids once, pretending to be our favorite basketball player as we tried to swish (but mostly bricked) deep threes and drove to the rack with abandon, only crushing gravity defying dunks when we lowered the rim down to six or seven feet. Growing up in the early 80s, my friends all wanted to be Bird or Magic or Dr. J. Since I wasn’t all that good at shooting the ball, that often left me pretending to be the guys who were good at passing or defense or rebounding. There weren’t a lot of those types of guys to choose from on the early 80s Cavs teams (to see why, reference #CavsRank Villain Number 3), but I usually made do with guys like John Bagley, or if I was feeling my shot on a given afternoon, World B. Free (mainly since I loved shouting his name when a crazy shot actually went in).

That all changed in 1986, when the Cavs transformed their perennially moribund roster with an amazing haul of future greats. Suddenly, I had Brad and Mark and Ron and Hot Rod to choose from. But it was an unassuming G/F from Lubbock, Texas, who seemed to fit my own unassuming pick-up game style to perfection. After all, Craig Ehlo became the Cavs’ designated stopper for the other team’s best players, and since my friends had added Jordan and Drexler to their Magic and Bird repertoire, I would always pretend to be Ehlo and try to shut them down. And, just as there was something special every time Ehlo hit an unexpected three to remind other teams he could score a little too, there was something truly awesome about hitting an unsuspecting three of my own when my friends would dare me to shoot.

That’s what made “The Shot” that much more fundamentally devastating to me… that shared kinship I felt with Craig Ehlo. The 1989 playoffs were the one time that the Cavs and Bulls faced off, and the Cavs were decidedly the better team. It took a Herculean effort by MJ to overcome the higher seeded Cavaliers in the five-game first round series. Most people only remember “The Shot.” Maybe they remember the 44 points that Jordan scored in the fifth and deciding game. If they remember Craig Ehlo, it’s only the agonizing image of him crumpling to the ground in despair as MJ again leapt in the air, fiercely pumping his fist, then landing and giving several more fist pumps while yelling, “Go home!” at the dumbstruck Cavs fans in attendance.

What they might not remember, is that Ehlo had his best game of the series (and maybe his best game as a Cav), leading the team with 24 points in only 27 minutes of play. They might not remember Ehlo lighting it up, shooting 9-15, including 4-7 from beyond the arc. They might not remember Ehlo in-bounding the ball to Larry Nance with six seconds to go after MJ had given the Bulls a 99-98 lead, then getting the ball back and hitting a tough, MJ contested layup that looked like the game winner with three seconds left.

“I wish I was like Michael and I could have hung in the air for three seconds before I made that layup,” Ehlo told reporters afterward.

“He should’ve been the hero,” Lenny Wilkens wrote in his book Unguarded.

Ehlo claimed he was never bitter about his place in history or what happened that day, that frozen moment in time against Jordan. But, I remember being bitter on his behalf. Ehlo didn’t deserve what happened to him, and neither did the Cavs. In that moment, my hatred for Michael Jordan was truly born, and his place of villainy was reserved in my brain right next to John Elway.

I never wanted to “Be Like Mike.” I never drank another Gatorade again out of protest. Even their computer generated revisionist take on “The Shot” in this 2005 commercial provided me no solace some 16 years after the event. Yes, Michael Jordan went on from that moment to become arguably the greatest basketball player of all time. But, for me, he became the ultimate target for decades of loathing.

When the Cavs finally do capture that elusive championship, I hope that Craig Ehlo is there to see it. He deserves to feel that joy, after so many years of being displayed as the goat that got beat by the supposed G.O.A.T.

Robert Attenweiler:

As much as it may seem to most of us that we had no choice but to be Cleveland sports fans — that we were born into it, either by the nurture of actual birth, or the nature of being born with a particularly self-flagellating streak in our personality — sports loyalty is actually all about choice.

In choosing which players and teams to root for, you are, in a sense, jotting down yourself in shorthand, externalizing how you define your identity.

Do you root for your hometown teams? If you have no hometown teams, do you pick the closest team to your hometown as the crow flies? Do you choose to root for the same team as your family and friends? Or do you choose to root against those closest to you? Do you take your first steps toward the sacred commitment of fandom based on a team’s colors, its mascot or winning percentage?

The tale of who we root for and why is each of our own little origin story, the radioactive spider bite that gives us the superhuman ability to endure disappointment after crushing disappointment — and, yes, the occasional smattering of success — over the course of a lifetime.

In 2007, LeBron James put his origin story on display by wearing a New York Yankees ball cap to an Indians/Yanks playoff game. James grew up rooting, not for the teams of the region that he has come to so publicly advocate, but for the Yankees, the Chicago Bulls and the Dallas Cowboys; in short, for the winning teams of his youth.

Just as telling as who plays the baby faces in every sports fan’s personal cosmos, though, is who plays that fan’s heel. Who we choose to boo — and #CavsVillains has proven nothing if not this — says as much about us as who we choose to cheer.

When I came on board as a NBA fan — as a Cavaliers fan, specifically — Michael Jordan had already hit “The Shot.” He had already won his first of six titles. He had already exhibited his Jordan Brand of personal mastery over some otherwise sporting Cavs teams. So, yes, the membership card I was signing obliged me to cheer for my first two favorite Cavs players — Mark Price and Larry Nance — and, later on, the players pulling on jerseys with names like “Brandon,” “Phills,” “Miller,” and “Ilagauskas” stitched on the back. But it also demanded — and if you look closely at the membership card, it’s there written in small type — that I rain some Old Testament-style hate upon the original number 23.

I was living in Cleveland when The Arena Formerly Known As Gund opened. During that time, I’d go see Cavs-Bulls games where it seemed like more fans came dressed in Bulls gear than wore anything Cavs-related. In those games, Jordan would seem to get more cheers on one made jump shot than the entire Cavs line-up could coax from the crowd over the course of an entire game. I would take in this scene, clad in a powder blue and black Price jersey, and seethe. The fact that the crowd was right — that Jordan deserved those cheers in the same way that James deserves them from opposing crowds today — made me root against Jordan all the more.

I was years in before I could separate my love of basketball from my practiced anti-Jordan agenda, and even admit just how damned fine it was to watch him play the game. In hindsight, I want those years back so I can spend time appreciating the greatness of his game, rather than just dwelling on the myriad of ways in which Jordan seemed responsible for my own sports indoctrination being less than perfect (but, also, kinda perfect too, y’know?).

So, it’s not a clip of “The Shot” that I turn to when I think about Michael Jordan’s place among the all-time #CavsVillains. It’s not even the playoffs meetings in the early-90s. It’s more something like a mid-90s regular season home game for the Cavs, where the crowd cheers for Jordan and seems almost disappointed if the Cavs win. It’s something a lot like this: