Court Inspection: Introduction to the Edited Collection

Abstract

In April 2023, the auction house Sotheby’s held a special bidding process as it auctioned a pair of game-worn Jordan shoes, which the icon had worn in game 2 of the 1998 NBA finals. The Chicago Bulls defeated the Utah Jazz in the series making Jordan a six-time champion and establishing the Bulls as a, arguably the best, basketball dynasty of the 1990s. Ultimately, the shoes were sold for a staggering 2.2 million dollars—the most expensive trainers ever sold. The prior record, 1.47 million dollars, was also held by Jordan equipment, namely a pair of Nike’s which Jordan wore during his 1984 rookie season. However, these items are not the only basketball memorabilia whose sale generates enormous prices. A game-worn jersey—this time from game 1 of the 1998 finals series—went for 10.1 million dollars and the sneakers Michael Jordan was wearing during the shooting of the film Space Jam still realized a price of 176,000 dollars. Arguably, a key contributor to what powered the exorbitant prices of the 1998 items has been the documentary The Last Dance (2020), which provided an in-depth view on Jordan’s career, with a particular focus on the 1997/98 season. Space Jam, The Last Dance, Nike, or the Jordan Brand, it does not take much research to realize that Michael Jordan—as one example of many—was and still is more than just an athlete. Without a doubt, Jordan has been extremely dominant on the court and has earned his spot in the frequently held discussions about who the greatest player of all time is. However, drawing from Baudrillard’s (1981) simulacrum concept, it can also be argued that Michael Jordan as a person has become hyperreal in the sense that his on-court performances and persona have been complemented by “multi-textual and multi-platform promotional entit[ies]” (Andrews & Jackson, 2001, p. 7). As such, Michael Jordan has plentiful connections to different entities or, more theoretically spoken, texts (cf. Neuhaus & Thomas, 2022), such as but not limited to “(sub-)culture(s), geographies, or history” (Neuhaus & Thomas, 2021, p. 176). This embeddedness into a web of texts not just made Jordan “perhaps the best and most well-known athlete in the world” (Dyson, 1993, p. 64) and “more popular than Jesus” (Vancil, 1992, p. 51) but also favored the process of producing a simulacrum. And these “[s]imulacra, however, are more than identical carbon copies because they gain a life of their own and become ‘real’ in the sense of becoming an own entity” (Mayrhofer et al., 2021, p. 5). In his analysis, Baudrillard (1989) argues that the United States—or, more specifically, the actual country in contrast to its perception abroad—can be considered a simulacrum, which has gained a life on its own. These intertextual structures are not controlled by individuals, yet some actors can execute more influence than others and perpetuate a preferred narrative. As such, certain interpretations of a given entity or person are always just “sanitized snapshots” (McDonald, 2005, p. 248) as well as reflections of temporarily existing power structures and dominant ideas. In the case of Michael Jordan, the NBA—as one example of a corporate actor and part of the sports-related hero generating complex (cf. Bette, 2019)—“kept [Jordan] away from the stereotypical image of urban black Americans” (Andrews & Silk, 2010, p. 1629) and, instead, enacted him as the “embodiment of American virtue” (Naughton, 1992, p. 154)—always in line with the, back then dominant, “Reaganite ideology” (Andrews & Silk, 2010, p. 1627). In retrospect, the media has played an important role in promoting the NBA and Jordan in particular as “Jordan’s capability to engage audiences was beyond compare at a time when, as David Stern recognized, TV and media exposure was indispensable to the fabrication of the player’s persona” (Thomas & Neuhaus, 2022, p. 140). Or, more provocatively speaking, whether a given athlete becomes a sports legend or icon depends not just on his/her on-court performance but also—and arguably more importantly—on the surrounding circumstances as well as further contextual factors.