Michael Jordan represents hope to a lot of people. I think his motivation came from an unshakeable inadequacy lodged deep within his psyche. No matter how hard he tried, Mike could never meet his own standards. While that would be enough to discourage most people, it only made him work harder. Mike saw impossibility but still worked towards reaching the unattainable. Mike thought of failure as a fate worse than death. A personal failure was greater to Mike than a natural disaster. To fail for Mike was for the basket not to count.
MJ often said that it wasn’t a physical challenge for him, playing against the best in the world, because his physical gifts so far outpaced theirs. His was a mental challenge. His only real opponent was himself. MJ wanted every second of every day to be better than any past versions of himself could have been. His spirit was so unmovable that NBA legends reflect on their encounters with him almost reverently. The man was not human, they claim, because he never slept, never ran out of energy, morning to dusk. His body and mind were simply on another level. On top of that, he wanted it more than anyone else did.
I saw this clip of MJ driving hard to the lane, taking flight as he tended to do, headed for a sure dunk. A few milliseconds after he got airborne, an irate defender came crashing through the screen. This man was big, a Power Forward, stocky, muscular. He leaned into MJ mid-flight with all his weight, wanting to push him through the floorboards. It should have been enough to throw MJ off his path and make the ball go flying out of his hand. MJ’s body momentum swerved to the left for a bit, but it felt like his body adjusted and pushed back against the opponent. Mind you that he was still in the air, still didn’t have anything to get leverage from. It was clear by the change in his inertia that a dunk was no longer an option. But MJ didn’t stop. He changed his grip on the ball, flipped his hand so that it was under and not over, and released it in a soft finger roll, laying it into the basket ever so gently.
When MJ landed, he wasn’t mad at the defender. He didn’t even acknowledge his presence, let alone get in his face and ask why such a flagrant foul. Instead, his body clutched up, arms curled at the elbows, biceps flexing, pecs flexing, fists clenching, screaming in place. Talking to no one but himself, but staring at the camera before him. His face contorted into an image I’ll never forget – a mix of rage and fury, an unwillingness to be denied, a statement of purpose. They replayed the entire clip in slow motion and what haunted me more than his mid-air acrobatics was his face on the ground. He was screaming in super-slo-mo, something the cameras couldn’t catch even at full speed. His rage far surpassed anger; there was a deeper message within the emotions painted on his face, almost as if to say: I might not control much in this life, but I can do my best to ensure this ball enters that rim.
With every shot he took, MJ said I’ll always be black in America, a perpetual specter waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I control my destiny insofar as I can control my body, and contort it how I wish, so that the ball enters the basket. Michael looked like a demon possessed by a devil when his feet caught ground that night. His face was indistinguishable from a serial killer’s. The level of determination needed to be Michael Jordan cannot be overstated. To be blessed with such physical gifts could have been enough to make him the greatest without any concerted effort on his part. My question is: what drove Mike? If I could interview him, and if I’d known him for enough years to get the truth out of him, I wonder what he’d tell me?
He’d probably say that life is what you make it, and to remember that regret is the number one cause of unhappy deaths. One night, towards the end of his career, Mike got pulled from the game by his coach. He’d missed his first 11 shots, and made the 12th, before coach decided he was done for the night. Mike was perplexed, asking why he was on the bench. Coach said, “because you just missed 11 of your last 12 shots, Mike.” Mike looked back at him like he’d said the stupidest thing a man could say. “But coach,” he replied, “I just made that last one.” Life was about one shot and one shot only to Mike, because we really only get one shot at this, one moment, and any one of those shots we take could be our last. We could die before the ball reaches its destination, and, the funny thing that we never acknowledge is that we most likely will.
In the Somali language, we have a word – Khasaaro – which roughly translates to disaster. It can be used to describe both a natural disaster of epic proportions or a personal failure, like not passing a routine exam at school. In my language, the macro can easily be substituted for the micro. This concept is predicated on our understanding of shame, or the fear of it; to us, shame is as potent a motivator as is any fear of failure. I imagine Mike had nightmares about missing shots. Mike didn’t care about championships, that was the Macro. Mike didn’t care about coaches, GMs, or supporting cast on the floor. All Mike cared about was the Micro. This possession, this shot, this break to the basket. This life. If this shot didn’t go in, Mike would die. It was life or death with every bounce for Mike.
It’s life or death with every word I type, though I don’t see failure as an option. Like Mike, I’m driven by a deeper purpose than most. My goal is not to win championships, my goal is to defeat myself. My goal is to reach that most vaunted of peaks: self-understanding. My goals come tumbling out with every word that I type, like ice out of a tumbler, and though I don’t drink martinis, I certainly know what the urge to escape can drive a man to do. And I’m driven to be greater than the sum of all my weaknesses.
And I breathe out my regrets before they have a chance to set into my heart, clutching it like invasive species of ivy, wrapping around it, digging in like the talons of carrion, bleeding it dry, making it shriveled and black, like the lungs of a smoker.
Like the lungs of a black man hanging from a high rope, gasping. One of my favorite rappers is named Kemba. He once said, “Niggas banging with the 5-0, Niggas hanging from a high rope, Niggas praying for vitiligo.” We kill, are killed, and pray to be saved. We pray for the safety that white skin provides. We don’t want to be white, no, that would be a fate worse than personal failure, but we still long for safety. There are certain anxieties that make me more anxious than others. One of them is not having enough pockets. The other is seeing flashing lights in my rearview.
And no matter how many times we write about this subject, it will never become any less pressing or urgent. It will forever be on the tips of our black tongues, on the edge of our black minds. The fact that white life wants us extinguished, snuffed like flames. To turn our dancing orange spirits, flickering in the wind, to crispy-black, dead-still wax strings, crooked towards the ground like a man in prayer, like a question mark suspended in midair. White America makes me pose a question which I doubt will ever be answered: what does black life mean to those who have no fear of God or consequence?
I awoke from a dream this morning and there was one sentence repeating itself on my lips: anything you do in life can and will be used against you in a court of death by a jury of the ever-living.