Author: By Mark Jurkowitz, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 31, 1999

Page: F1

Section: Books

Playing for keeps
Michael Jordan and the World He Made
By David Halberstam. Random House. 426 pp. Illustrated. $24.95.

Sports Illustrated suggested his retirement was the equivalent of Shakespeare hanging up his pen. Newsweek declared: ``No Heirs to Air Jordan.'' The Weekly Standard, a journal of conservative politics, compared him to William Tecumseh Sherman and Bill Gates. And for the sake of avoiding blasphemy, we won't even catalog the references to him as some kind of deity.

Amid the onslaught of superlatives that greeted the retirement of the greatest hoopster/

marketer/crossover celebrity ever to lace on a pair of sneakers, author David Halberstam has attempted not just to celebrate Michael Jordan's legacy, but to explain it.

In ``Playing for Keeps,'' which admirably details Jordan the phenomenon while leaving us thirsting for more of Jordan the man, Halberstam lays out the fearsome dimensions of that legacy. In 1983, the season before Jordan arrived in the pros, the Chicago Bulls won 27 games; by the time he left, they had won six National Basketball Association championships. In 1978, NBA players earned a total of about $40 million in salary; 20 years later, that number was roughly $1 billion. (Jordan himself earned around $80 million last year, on and off the court.) In 1984, when Jordan was a rookie, Nike had revenues of slightly over $900 million; by 1998, Jordan's sneaker company was taking in more than $9 billion. And while superstars like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson deserve plenty of credit, too, it was during Jordan's tenure that the NBA transformed itself from a league that mainstream America feared as too black and too playground into a family-friendly, mega-marketing wonder.

All this in a remarkable basketball career bookended by Jordan's NCAA-championship-winning jump shot for the University of North Carolina in 1982 and his NBA-title-winning jump shot for the Bulls against Utah in 1998.

Had the title not been taken, Halberstam could have called this book ``1984.'' For it is in that year, he posits, that a harmonic convergence anointed Jordan as ``the signature commercial representative of this great new athletic-cultural-commercial empire.''

It was in 1984, writes Halberstam, that a five-year old cable network called ESPN, which would revolutionize sports televison, ``truly came of age.'' At the same time, David Stern -- the driven, creative son of a Manhattan deli owner -- was becoming NBA commissioner and a tough, aggressive sports lawyer named David Falk was becoming an important force in the balance of power between owners and players. And of course, 1984 was the year Michael Jordan entered the league.

Halberstam characterizes Jordan as the athlete who penetrated more ``deeply into the psyche of the American public'' than any other sports star. (In the warm glow of his current status as tragic hero, people tend to forget that the young Muhammad Ali was a divisive figure in this society). But he also makes it clear that aside from being the right man at the right time, Jordan was a one-in-a-million man.

The ``epiphany'' occurred, the book proclaims, one night in 1984 when the young Jordan turned the heads of the all-white clientele at a restaurant in Portland, Ore. As the athlete returned their stares with an easy smile, ``race simply fell away,'' Halberstam writes. ``Michael was no longer a black man, he was just someone you wanted to be with.'' This appeal would translate into the unforgettable ``be like Mike'' commercial spots.

Halberstam, the much-honored journalist, cultural historian, and author of 16 books, is at his best populating ``Playing for Keeps'' with Jordan's supporting cast. There is Phil Jackson, the Zen-like coach of the Bulls, struggling to balance his own 1960s free spirit with his parents' religious fundamentalism. Dean Smith, the great North Carolina coach who molded Jordan, is a pillar of avuncular rectitude, demanding that his players attend church unless they have a note from their parents. And Halberstam weighs in on the heated debate over which Jerry -- Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf or Bulls general manager Jerry Krause -- is the bigger jerk. (In his book, the insecure yet egomaniacal Krause wins hands down.)

Halberstam also succeeds in giving us the basic Mount Rushmore portrait of Jordan. He is the product of a strong and nurturing family, the beneficiary of a wonderful North Carolina basketball program, and the possessor of an almost incomprehensible desire to drive himself to the pinnacle of success.

Tales of his insane will to win abound. When Bulls teammate Dave Corzine consistently whips him at Pac-Man, Jordan actually buys a machine and practices until he can beat his tormentor. He is the kind of guy who is willing to bribe an airport baggage handler to win a bet from unsuspecting teammates over whose luggage will come down the chute first.

His toughness, often tinged with nastiness, is equally legendary. In the 1992 NBA finals, Jordan -- angered by speculation that Portland guard Clyde Drexler was his near-equal as a player -- responded by draining six straight three-point shots against the helpless Drexler. But he was just as intense in preseason practice, once retaliating against a rookie who had gotten a little physical with him by knocking him cold with a well-placed elbow.

Where ``Playing for Keeps'' has problems is in getting deeper inside Jordan's head. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that Halberstam never got to sit down with Jordan. But even so, there are some glaring gaps in this portrait that are too easily glossed over. Serious gambling problems cited by Halberstam -- including a five-day run of $165,000 in losses to some card-playing and golfing partners, and hundreds of thousands in golf debts racked up in another 10-day period -- are conveniently chalked up to what Jordan's father called ``a competitiveness problem.''

More disturbing is Halberstam's softness in dealing with the matter of Jordan's detachment from politics and social issues, his reluctance to squander any commercial capital for a cause. Take his decision not to endorse Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte, N.C., who has twice tried to unseat US Senator Jesse Helms, the conservative Republican who is anathema to many of the African-Americans in Jordan's home state. But Republicans purchase Nikes as well, Jordan noted pointedly. In the few pages in which Halberstam addresses the matter, he basically gives Jordan an uncontested layup.

Jordan's views on the ``black condition,'' Halberstam writes, are evident in ``the way he played in big games under unrelenting pressure, the way he comported himself on and off the court in front of the most intrusive media scrutiny in modern history,'' and in ``how shrewd a businessman he had become.''

All of which reinforces the inevitable conclusion that it was Jordan's sheer excellence as a player -- not his spirituality or even his agreeable personality -- that is responsible for his reshaping the sport. In the wake of his departure, he leaves a league torn asunder by labor-management disagreements serious enough to have produced a lockout, by diminishing public interest, and by the obvious lack of a successor. The man one player called ``Jesus in Nikes'' has left the court. And as Halberstam makes eminently clear, there is neither a new messiah -- nor the conditions that could give rise to one -- on the horizon.