All during the Covid shutdowns where sports was obviously hit very hard leaving people cleaving for anything, the ESPN documentary on Michael Jordan ‘The Last Dance’ was showing from week to week giving talk radio personalities something to discuss. Given the unreliability of supply chains to provide me with the amount of bullets I needed for shooting I took it upon myself to make my own at my shop bench leaving me with more hours than usual to listen to those programs, so I heard a lot about ‘The Last Dance’ before I ever watched it, and now that its on Netflix as a complete release for streaming, I was able to catch up. The result was that ‘The Last Dance’ is really something special that captures a time in Americana that most of us would love to see again, and that Michael Jordan in hindsight, especially after watching Kobe Bryant and LeBron James attempt to be just as good as Mike, but falling very short, the trip down memory lane especially as Covid had literally shut down the world was I think important. As I was watching the program I thought back to all those professional sports analysists on talk radio and wondered how they had missed the point of the entire show, the several lines of importance that the show was all about, because they directly led to the problem we are seeing now, where sports and sports figures were hijacked by progressive politics to the point where many won’t even stand for the national anthem. The thing that separated Michael Jordan from everyone else, even today was that he understood his role in sports and what that role was to others, and he never wavered.

I never thought of Michael Jordan as a black man until Barack Obama made it quite clear in ‘The Last Dance’ that he felt the star basketball player for the Chicago Bulls had an obligation because of his skin color to represent progressive civil rights causes. Jordan smartly when under great pressure at the height of his popularity refused to pick a side by saying to several other teammates on the traveling bus “that Republicans buy tennis shoes too.” And there it was, the theme of the entire show, and the very diseased outlook that has contaminated modern sports and entertainment where even baseball stars are kneeling at the National Anthem. Jordan was a capitalist, he had parents who were smart, and they actually forced the young Jordan to visit Nike and hear their pitch to him to develop Air Jordans. They may have been black, but they obviously loved America and the opportunities it could give their young son, and Mike listened to them even when it was tempting to hear other voices who all wanted a piece of the Michael Jordan rock.

Jordan was a businessman, he enjoyed capitalism and he found in basketball an outlet for his true love of winning. He was smart enough to understand that what made him great was his competitive drive and so long as he focused on that, everything else would take care of itself. He did not get pulled into political causes by the drowning people of the world the way LeBron James has, essentially splitting half the country against him. Jordon let his game play do all his talking, to the public he was nice the way his parents taught him to be. To his teammates he was ruthless in his pursuit of perfection which is an element about him that set him apart from every other basketball player in the history of the NBA. It is astonishing to watch ‘The Last Dance’ in hindsight because it’s clear where the NBA is going, and where Nike, ESPN and so many other entertainment venues are lost now that they don’t have a Michael Jordan figure to hook their stars to. They are all dying because as natural looters Michael Jordan carried them all, built them to greatness by association. Without Michael Jordan, they can’t do it on their own and fall into decline. The NBA today is essentially a spokesman for Chinese communism, and people are not excited about it. You don’t see anybody like Michael Jordan playing today. There are good, talented people, but there aren’t players that everyone likes the way that people loved the winner Michael Jordan presented to them.

I always did like Michael Jordan, which is why I took the time to watch ‘The Last Dance.’ I have a similar problem that Jordan does, I obsess over winning and feel I must crush my opponents at everything. I’ve managed a different way to deal with that burden which Jordan never did come to terms with. Instead he used it to his advantage and obsessed his way into becoming the most alpha, of all alpha males in a sport dominated by the top alphas in sports and it was a 24 hour 7 days per week thing that never turned off. When I say I understand Michael Jordan’s competitive spirit, his need to win everything, to gamble anything, and to take any attack on him very personal and to turn it into greatness, I saw that without the good parents Jordan had and other older people to guide him along, Michael Jordan would have easily become another self-destructive individual face down at a Black Jack table in a casino drunk and penniless. But because he found an outlet in sports as guided by his dad, he was able to take those personality traits into a positive direction, and we are all the better for it.

But I wasn’t surprised that Michael Jordan never really had peace, that he worked at being great all day long, seldom hanging out around the house with his family pouring everything into being the best. Most great people could tell the same story yet even knowing that, Michael Jordan’s work ethic was phenomenal. And that is what people saw in him and loved. Jordan never used his skin color as a point of political leverage, instead he used the things he did in life to tell his story and that is what made him a great American and preserves his memory for all time. The interviews in ‘The Last Dance’ with Barack Obama told a lot about the world we are living in. Obama loved Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, but the former President’s below the line beliefs could not grasp why Michael was great. He was left only to observe that he was even though it went against all his socialist views of how the world should be. But Jordan understood the power of his individual spirit and he used that spirit to do great things and because of that, the Bulls were a great team, Chicago had something to cheer for, and America could relate to where skin color didn’t matter a bit. For anybody who insists that America is a racist nation, all they need to do is watch ‘The Last Dance’ and they’ll understand that a culture that can produce a Michael Jordan, that can give a platform for someone like him to speak with action, is nothing close.

Since Michael Jordan’s playing days those who came along with him found themselves just as lost as the Bulls were when he retired twice, and immediately became just an average team. It truly is individuals like Jordan who make greatness and it is the search of capitalism to always find such people. Without those opportunities people like Michael Jordan just stay hidden from the world and explode in on themselves in the corners of life. And the world that the NBA supports now, along with the looter class of politicians like Barack Obama don’t understand greatness. They think like the management of the Chicago Bulls thought, that its organizations who produce greatness, not individuals. Yet, since Michael Jordan has left, the Chicago Bulls have never touched greatness again providing proof that the course everyone is on now is a lost, and empty chase for a utopia that only exists in the hard work of individuals who find greatness by committing to it with their total essence, and nothing less.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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