Notes

Me and Mike

The first real book I ever read was a 200 page biography of Michael Jordan. I was eight years old and I read it over the course of my third grade year (I had zero competition for the book during reading time; the ideal market for in-depth Michael Jordan stories was surprisingly not eight year old Canadians in 2006).

The book was more or less a fluff piece, the type of surface-level positivity you'd imagine would find itself in the enclaves of a suburban elementary school. And yet, the story burrowed its way into the very entrails of my skull. I knew about Jordan from stories my dad told me, so he wasn't a completely alien figure and the more-than-perfect arc of his career is undeniably appealing, but there was something beyond simple narrative aesthetics that appealed so strongly to my prepubescent brain; somehow, in my very heart of hears, I knew that Mike and I were exactly alike.

To compare oneself to a professional athlete, let alone one of the most successful professional athletes, is almost always an exercise in vanity. "No, I don't have God-given talent, a Herculean physique, or a psychotic work ethic, but other than that, I'm exactly like this nimble, multi-millionaire supersoldier!"

But the similarity that I saw between MJ and me was mental. It was of our thought processes. It was of obsession. I didn't know that when I first read the book, but I quite quickly found an array of sources, some flattering and some decidedly not, that expounded upon Michael's lifelong obsessions. With success. With competition. With crushing his opponents beyond anything recognizable, a meaty pulp the only thing left under his deliciously overpriced shoes.

I'm far from a competitive person, but obsession is perhaps the most apt descriptor of the way my brain has interacted with the world. It was a symptom in my case, but I don't view it as fundamentally dissimilar. It was still obsession. Obsession with numbers, with people, with memories. Being unable to sleep when I was ten because of the wackadoodle thought spirals that have comprised the mental processes of my life.

Michael could never get to sleep either. For him it was because he was obsessed with winning. He couldn't get the buzzing, the high of the game, the thrill of the fight, to fade away even though it was bedtime. For me, it was because I had to run through the names of the other kids in my class three times before I could close my eyes.

We're the same, really.

But eventually, my obsession turned away from such frivolous compulsive tendencies. It whittled its way down to obsession with achievement. Obsession with getting what I wanted. Every ounce of my ambitions and dreams would be mine because I obsessed too much about it to even remotely consider otherwise. And while the specifics of my ambitions changed as I grew up, that fundamental truth didn't. And when I saw other people getting what I wanted, it only served to further drive in the perceived necessity that I had to get what I believed was mine.

There's another similarity. Mike was always feeling slighted. His family's earliest memories of him practising basketball come from when he was five, working on his shot to beat his brother. He wanted to beat him because he felt his dad loved his brother more than him.

And so it went for me. It was different, but the same. Instead of slights from a specific person that drove me insane, it was from an uncaring universe. When my best friend got a dog and I didn't, I hated it. When another student got into a Gifted program and I didn't, I hated it. When my mother complimented anyone other than me, I hated it. I was somehow both smart enough to realize that it wasn't me that was being targeted by these events and yet too dumb to tell myself I was wrong to feel this way. I wanted what I wanted and seeing anybody else get it was a failure. It was me who had to win. Me and only me.

That was my life for a while. Putting less effort than I admittedly should have into what I wanted, but Jordan (and my obsession) never far from my thoughts. And the perceived ills that afflicted me and only me only grew stronger. The longer you live, the more you see your enemies win, and what irked me the most was how few of them would even consider themselves my enemies. Life moves on whether you'd like it to or not and I felt my ability to compete with the idealized version of myself slipping further and further out of my already loose grasp.

And then my brother died and suddenly Mike and I had another thing in common.

James R. Jordan Sr. was born on August 1st, 1936 in Wallace, North Carolina. He married Deloris Peoples in 1956 and had five children, one of them being, by general acclamation, the greatest basketball player who ever lived. And to call him just Michael's father would be selling him short. He was Michael's motivation, his best friend, his greatest critic, his biggest fan, his smartest and most insightful mentor. And he was gunned down on the side of a North Carolina highway by an unknown assailant, just five months after Michael turned 30.

My brother died both much less mysteriously and by extension much more tragically. He jumped off the fifth floor of a multi-story parking garage and was dead nearly the instant he hit the ground. By far the worst part of it for me was the unholy period when I got the calls that something was wrong but I didn't know what was going on. It was a lack of control, a limbo I had no power in, an absence of both agency and knowledge that went against everything I chose to believe in.

Finding out he was dead was almost a relief. At least I had a new world to obsess in.

There's a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding Jordan's first retirement in 1993. I choose to believe the public story. That he was devastated by the loss of his father and chose to step away from the game he loved.

It makes sense. But it also makes sense that what he did next was almost an exact repudiation of that. His entrance into baseball, his slog of a ride in the minor leagues, his triumphant return into basketball where he set new records and reached still untouched heights.

Michael loved his father more than anything. But obsession is stronger than love. And when one has to compete, one competes. One when has to win, one wins. The tragic backstory becomes just a footnote.

The second thought I had when I found out my brother was dead was "I hope I can leave home soon and get back to work."

Obsession takes no prisoners. It holds no holidays, no religious observances, no vacations. It is forever and always.

When the Chicago Bulls won the NBA championship in 1996, having sported a then-record 72 wins in the regular season, Michael Jordan jumped for joy, having capped a season no player since has replicated. And then he looked into the stands, hoping to catch a glimpse of his father, forgetting just for a moment that he had been senselessly dead for more than three years. And then he went into the locker room, ignored his teammates, and wept.

The people who grow up without a dream try to find solace in the givens of life. That family, not career, is what matters most. That love, not obsession, is what makes the world go round. It's certainly pretty to think so and perhaps more healthy to as well. I'm not one to argue that career based goals are the true engine of the universe, but I am one to simply point out that people who decry competitiveness and obsession are almost always not arguing from a place of experience.

When one has a dream, a goal, an ambition, that one truly, truly, truly obsesses over, it's not a question of what one will do to get to that point, it's a question of what happens after they get there.

Ultimately, I am far from Michael Jordan, light years away from even his most pedestrian accomplishments at a similar age. My ambitions are still unfounded, my dreams still just fantasies. I'm still caught in that limbo of not knowing what to do, how to do it. it's not that I don't know how to fully process the prospects of tragedy, it's just that I have more important things to do.

Rats in captivity have been observed to chew their own tails off to reach cheese that has been set out for them.

When one wants something more than can be expressed, suppression of pain is not a sign of being emotionally inarticulate. It's survival.

Perhaps what waits me on the other side of whatever journey I'm on is the same thing that waited for Michael on that night in 1996. Unspeakable pain finally bursting through the surface, a breakdown just begging to happen when I'm on a stage and all at once I remember I'll never see his eyes again. But never getting the chance to experience that is infinitely more horrifying to me than knowing for certain that that's what's there.

Jordan still can't get to sleep. Neither can I, even if at the moment it's for marginally different reasons. But eventually it'll be the same cause that it's always been. It's knowing that even a moment spent away from working towards what I want seems like a betrayal. But eventually I'll close my eyes and wake up to a new sun. The days eventually fade, even if the buzzing never really does.