MJ and I
By Evan Hanford
I can remember growing up, I had the largest room in the house, it was the nineties, and I proudly hung that famous Nike poster: the one where MJ stood, arms stretched out, palming a basketball in one hand, and the words of William Blake, ‘No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings,’ below. I also had a soft spot for Gary Payton, John Stockton, Karl Malone, and Charles Barkley. The first time we were exposed to basketball: the 1993 NBA Finals, featuring the Bulls versus the Suns. The Bulls beat the Suns four games to two in a best of seven series. They looked like giants, superheroes performing heroic deeds, the tension of a close game, the rivalries, all of it; it was like ballet meets Ultimate Fighting.
One day, while in my final year at Narrabundah College, I broke my arm while trying to dunk on someone much shorter than me. I got hit pretty hard: my legs swept out from under me, and I landed on my right arm and broke it. It was six weeks of misery. A six-week recovery time meant six weeks of misery. I became depressed. The two things that brought me out of my head enough to not get down on myself, bass guitar and basketball, were suddenly out of the question, which was the only two things that got me out of my head enough to not get down on myself. We had this little TV, and on a Saturday morning, they would show taped delayed games that my brother and I would watch.
He was a good basketball player, my brother. I was only really a playground player. My sport was Rugby Union, my team was the best of the lower grade and the worse of the higher grade. We would win a championship once a year and then get taken up a level and get our butts handed to us. I think there was even one season in the A division where we didn’t win a single game.
I would go to my brother’s games and see how good he was: watching on with awe as he owned the court. Then, one day, his team started a fast break and he caught the ball on the left side – swished a ten-foot bank shot, turned around, trotted down the court, and snaffled up the defensive rebound. I was very impressed. It was the sporting equivalent of a Miles Davis solo.
So where does MJ fit into all this? He was at least the best player of his era and easily top five of all time. Here’s the thing about MJ: he’s one of those guys who, if he can’t be good at something, he’s going to be great. He also, at least to my mind, had such a ferocious competitive nature that on most nights he was pretty much playing against either history or himself.
I pretty much gave up on sports for a while after injuring my arm, but the injury also accounted for the fingerpicking style that I now use when I’m playing my electric bass. In the time that passed before graduation, I crammed really hard – I had a very demanding course load – because I wanted to go to university.
I remember the lacuna between my last months of high school and the start of my gap year was filled with me falling in love with the bass guitar, an instrument I had played in the high school orchestra in years nine and ten. It was a fun time – the kind of fun I might never have again. A couple of guys and I got to play at the graduation concert and all I can remember about that show was the drummer hitting the kick pedal so hard that the bass drum moved forward about half afoot.
But youth is wasted on the young. I still love a good ball game, though what remains of my jump shot is lost somewhere in time. I have also come to realise that I just can’t walk on the court anymore and compete at the level that I did when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty. I played on one of the Sydney University teams in my freshman year but got a bit bored with it. I was taking four subjects that semester and didn’t even own a guitar. I was destined to be a clerk in a law firm, a proofreader in a publishing house, or something similarly mundane.
Meanwhile, in the NBA, MJ came out of retirement at age 38 and was putting forty- and thirty-point games on all the younger players, playing for the Washington Wizards. That phase of his career was like watching Jesus in a pair of high-top sneakers. He had this great line where he said that he was coming back to teach the kids how to play the game. My friends and I huddled around a very lo-fi television to watch the Wizards play the Knicks on the opening night of the 2001 NBA season. Of course, there was a lot going on that was bad in the world at that time, but seeing MJ lace them up one more time, giving you some hope that there was still some good in the world.