The Genius of Competition

Michael Jordan was not just a great basketball player. There are lots of those.

Michael Jordan was a genius of competition.

Many elite athletes share a similar physical skillset. It was Jordan’s mind that put him in a different stratosphere all together.

In the days following his induction to the Basketball Hall of Fame, the media was filled with articles calling him out as impish and cynical. There was an article called ‘Sore Winner’ chronicling how Jordan never seemed satisfied with his accomplishments. Other articles cast the usual negative light on his multiple retirements, his foray into baseball and the things he did to disrupt having a picture perfect career path.

I don’t see those moments as randomly or negative as the media so loves to paint them. I see them as evidence of a genius testing the limits of competitive nature in ways that no one at that level ever had.

Jordan’s career was a study in finding heightened self motivation. In the era of multi-million dollar contracts, you can often see the complacency set in the day a rookie signs his first deal. Other players manage to keep their fire until they win a scoring title, make the all star team. Precious few other players keep their hunger until they manage to win a championship. After ultimate accomplishment, most humans sit back and think ‘well, I have that one, no one can take that away from me.’

No single accomplishment, or even collection of accomplishments was ever enough for Jordan.

He motivated himself in frighteningly unusual ways. He imagined far lesser opponents spewing insulting barbs at his Airness. Many of these taunts were later confirmed to be purely imaginary. Yet these perceived sleights would provide Jordan with the motivation to go on to drop 50 points on some poor opponent on during a meaningless regular season game in February.

He was notorious for playing cards in his hotel room, deep into the night, not letting his friends leave until he had won to his satisfaction. These usually would turn into all night sessions.

When he stepped away from the NBA after his first three-peat, he did so not to slink into a corporate coma and retirement befitting someone with his unprecedented marketing stature. But he took a far more curious route by opting instead for the dimly lit and dusty dugouts of minor league baseball. It seemed a random departure for an athlete at the top of his game, and the top of the world.

But what I see with that move, was a competitor who wanted to study the motivation and desperation of athletes at the lowest rungs of the professional sports ladder. He wanted to see what made them tick. He wanted to be around a more primitive competitive fire, to see if he could rekindle the love for his own game. Basketball had become too easy. He won three in a row. He needed to reconnect with something more elemental, something connected more intrinsically to the game itself. He needed to step away from the bright lights, cushy locker rooms. He needed to discover more than just a love of competing, but he wanted to feel the desperation of competition.

He found that in Birmingham.

The desperation to compete.

With a reprogrammed mind, and a former Bulls team unable to get over the hump, Jordan felt the desperation kick in for him. The Bulls needed him. They couldn’t do it without him, and he relished this role. He could renew his status as a hero in a new context. He was tired of being the dominator, and needed to engineer a way he could once again be the underdog. Stepping into baseball granted him this wish.

He came back. And he lost.

What did this do to him? It made him work for an entire offseason to evolve his game to a new level. A smarter level.

It propelled him to find a way to lead his team to more wins than any other NBA team in history.

He discovered a new way to dominate that relied less on physical prowess and straight leaping over NBA centers to ram the ball through the hoop. But instead he developed an unguardable fadeaway and a series new jab steps and fakes to create space.

In his time away, he had also realized just how capable Scottie Pippen was to lead an NBA team deep into the playoffs. Thus, for the second run of championships, Jordan seemed perfectly at ease deferring to Pippen for long stretches of time, only to summon himself in moments of desperation to seal victories in only the way Michael Jordan could.

Even after his picture perfect finish with the Bulls, hand raised up, clock winding down, a defeated Byron Russell collapsing beneath his triumphant pose; this was not enough for Jordan. It was good for all of the sportswriters in the world. But not the man himself.

Thus he would come back with the Wizards, again to prove something to himself. There was a rekindled motivation and he had to push it once again. This phase never reached the kind of glorious conclusion that could help the rest of us wrap out minds around exactly what he was doing.

But last time I checked, geniuses were never easy to understand.