Michael Jordan became the greatest of all for his constant desire to prove, the urge to take revenge, and quite a bit of marmor

Although I started my professional career as a weekly columnist on sports, in recent years I went downhill. A little bit of Betar, the Champions League in the minor, sometimes the English league. Basketball? Don't see at all. Not Israeli, not NBC. After years of intense surveillance, including unnatural waking in the middle of the night to watch college games with blind eyes, I got saturated. But then suddenly, in all of Corona, I was sucked in like half a world to watch ESPN and Netflix's documentary hit "The Last Dance" - the documentary series about Michael Jordan. 

From the movie "Spice Jam" (1996)

Which is strange to me, because in real time, in the 1990s, when I was living in New York, I loathed Jordan. I didn't suffer all this perfection that seemed boring, artificial, Barbie Style. I sympathized with the New York Knicks that were smeared on the hardwood like a thousand sack of potatoes and one humiliating way. Patrick Ewing, the huge chin from Jamaica, is crying on the feet of knees and knees from Formica. That's what I remember, Doctor. 

Time after time I watched Chicago humiliate New York in the Garden. But how do you say - I was a leftist and subversive, a non-conformist rebellious ally and somehow refused to submit to the mass psychosis of Michael's admiration. It's hard for me today with Messi, for example, but it's not the same. Because Messi is huge, a tremendous player, but Michael Jordan was perfection. His acting was the closest thing to a human sublime that exists. Like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, like Michelangelo's David statue, like Northern Lights over St. Petersburg. 

One insight has already been born in the first chapter. I was young and stupid. Because this is not just a huge talent but a phenomenon, a bigger event than basketball or sports in general. Because to be Jordan, to be the greatest basketball player in history, the human version of the platonic idea of ​​a basketball player, you have to work hard. And Jordan worked hard. I will not talk to you about basketball in the technical sense of exercises and squad. I don't understand that much, but I do understand that in the world of gentle snowflakes, in a world where every school on every boy's wand says to him "Wow, what a beauty, what a great smell, give another", and there are no failures and no outstanding, within all there is Something refreshing about seeing a man with tremendous talent working harder than any gray soul actor. A man whose excellence never made him freeze, just to aspire for more. He even attacks reality to be even better. 

And here we come to the issue of Hazel. The driving force. What made Jordan Jordan? And why did he now agree to produce the series? And why am I watching it on a matter beyond sports aesthetics? For me, the hidden thread in the series, the key moment through which the narrative can be navigated, happened 11 years ago at Symphony Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts. September 11, 2009. Jordan's Ceremony for the Basketball Hall of Fame. He makes a 23-minute speech, as his shirt number, and that speech is the key to him and the series. 

After an acceptable opening of clichés, thanks and tears, Jordan opened the (metaphorical) black pad and one by one listed the list of people who had insulted him, scolded him or challenged him. True insults and imagined insults, ones that he even knew how unfair. Open on everyone. Kindly, with a smile - but with diligence. He started with the high school coach who waved him out of the team (incorrectly, Jordan did not pitch but was put in the reserve team.

The same unfortunate coach suffered over the years in paranoia and became homeless), then moved on to the revered head coach of North Carolina College Dean Smith, continued with Azia Thomas, Pat Riley and of course the most notable, the uninvited man, Jerry Kraus, the professional manager Of Chicago during the glamor era. The crass and fat Kraus, the antithesis to the Apollo-like Jordan, Kraus who built a huge group that could provide him with the best mantle for years, was also the nemesis, both the negative and the enemy from within. Why? Because he said that winning organizations, not individual players. 

The speech had no subtext. Insult him, disrespect him, challenge him. Like Utah's guard, Byron Russell mentioned in the speech, who the day before the final said he "could keep Michael." In the world according to Jordan, "he had to pay the price." 

All those insults, according to Jordan, made him what he was. They were the combustion material of his competitiveness. They made him want more, more effort. 

In real time, some of the writers caught me by the speech, deviating from the rules of the ceremony. After all, what about Jordan, a billionaire in his own right, not a Cinderella story of a ghetto boy growing up but a good middle-class family, what to him and all this hostility, resentment and negative energy? After all, there's no story of color or discrimination here like Jackie Robinson, the first black professional baseball player. Why doesn't he act like Steph Kerry? Jordan also escaped politics. "Republicans also buy shoes," he said. But on the field, the driving force was jealousy, revenge, a war for dignity or disrespect he felt rightly or imagined. 

This feeling of insult becomes a 10,000 horsepower engine. In perspective of our politically correct days, Jordan's Basic approach is a really refreshing breeze. When you are the greatest player in history you will invent yourself if you need to, to be better, to fly higher. Competitiveness flows in his blood, in a sense it is also a living statue of capitalism. 

And that's the point. Greatness has a price. The legendary does not come in a gift box from a social worker or Mother Teresa. There is something dark about success. Hello, Mephisto peeking from Dr. Faust's shoulder. Because metaphorically, you must sell your soul to Satan to touch the sky. Robert Johnson sells his soul at a crossroads and becomes history's greatest guitarist. Michael Jordan invents and defeats enemies. And he's still disgruntled, even over the years, he still wants to show them, prove them. 

This murmur, which made him a speech like a Polish mother, did not make him the usual disgruntled material. You know the types. You can't stand them. They are busy with the misses and what they have done and are rotting within themselves. Jordan took the Marmor, the internal polish that each of us had, and made it a super motivation. 

And this is also a curse, the cash payment to the devil. Heck, the best player in history keeps a grudge 40 years for a miserable high school coach to preserve the will to win and excel. Every great one has a price because if it wasn't, and greatness was perfect, it wouldn't be human. And so now, because of LeBron James, because he hears the comparisons and explodes, and as usual luck goes with him, the Corona timing was a bingo. He again challenged himself and won.