Success and Resentment

“Jerry’s not here. I don’t know who’d invite him. I didn’t. I hope he understands it goes a long way. He’s a very competitive person. I was a very competitive person. He said organizations win championships. I said, ‘I didn’t see organizations playing with the flu in Utah. I didn’t see it playing with a bad ankle.’" - Michael Jordan



Just to place that quote in context - Jordan is speaking from the lectern at the Basketball Hall of Fame, to which he is being inducted. Jerry is Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner of the Chicago Bulls. Jordan then proceeds to call out the high school coach that benched him, fellow Hall of Famers Isaiah Thomas and Magic Johnson for allegedly freezing him out of the All Star Game in 1985, Byron Russell for mouthing off about Jordan's declining offensive capabilities during Jordan's first retirement/forced exile, declaring that all of their slights metastasized with his natural competitive spirit and formed a cancerous resentment that Jordan used to stay in top form as he aged. Retired and ensconced in the Hall of Fame, Jordan decided to give everyone an honest glimpse in to the soul of the best basketball player of all time.


I loved him for his courage and honesty.


Frankly, it is clear from every single published article and most anecdotal evidence that the majority of professional athletes are irredeemable assholes, the vainest and most spiteful of the entitled jocks that preen around high school quads. This gets disguised with idiotic boilerplate quotes in those same articles about 'playing the game the right way,' 'fire in the belly' 'drive' and shitty sycophantic testimony from coaches and teammates. Athletes with self-awareness are as rare as those with candor or conscientiousness. So I was thrilled when Jordan displayed both candor and self-awareness. When he decided to stand before the cameras and confess that it was his pettiness and self-absorption that left a hole in his soul that he filled with victories, championships and transcendent moments, it was as bracing as cold salt water in the face.


That inability to settle, to be fulfilled by anything but dominance is at the heart of all success, it seems. We recoil from this truth, and rather hypocritically condemn the few people who speak it aloud. Did sportswriters criticize Jordan simply for 'lacking class' or was it because he cut close to an elemental bit of the human psyche that most of us would rather not acknowledge?


Here's David Foster Wallace on the same phenomenon in David Lipsky's horrendous cash-in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, which I am ashamedly devouring: "And I don't think it's any different if you're like an accountant for Andersen & Andersen, you know? Some big accounting firm and that you know four or five other junior accountants get promoted ahead of you. Or the guys who got out of law school with you make partner before you do. I mean the craziness is exactly the same."


It doesn't have to be quite so twisted and negative as Jordan or Wallace is making it sound. In The Simpsons, Homer keeps a photo of Maggie on his control panel with the note 'Do It For Her.' Meaning, work a job that he hates for an evil, wizened plutocrat. Kanye West's track 'Big Brother' off Graduation is about the friendly artistic rivalry between himself and Jay-Z. The album Watch the Throne documents that same rivalry in excruciating detail. Half the reason Orson Welles made Citizen Kane was because William Randolph Hearst told RKO Pictures that Welles couldn't.


Think of any time that you have pictured the face of an S.O. when you notify them of a significant accomplishment. Any time that you have looked at a superior at work and thought 'I could do what that asshole does twice as well with half the bullshit.' Any time you worked at a project because you knew how pleased your parents would be when you earned a good grade. Of course, it only really counts if you do something about it.


There is a difference between embracing the challenge to better oneself and the black-hearted pursuit of a brass ring, and Michael Jordan should not be used as an example to anyone of balance on the road to excellence, but his words are ignored or dismissed at great peril. It is always important not to condemn messengers, but rather the values they represent. If Michael Jordan is the messenger of Being #1, perhaps we need to reconsider whether that's worth as much as we've been led to believe.