Jumpman: The Making and Meaning of Michael Jordan

by Johnny Smith

Overview

How Michael Jordan’s path to greatness was shaped by race, politics, and the consequences of fame

To become the most revered basketball player in America, it wasn’t enough for Michael Jordan to merely excel on the court. He also had to become something he never intended: a hero.
 
Reconstructing the defining moment of Jordan’s career—winning his first NBA championship during the 1990-1991 season—sports historian Johnny Smith examines Jordan’s ubiquitous rise in American culture and the burden he carried as a national symbol of racial progress. Jumpman reveals how Jordan maintained a “mystique” that allowed him to seem more likable to Americans who wanted to believe race no longer mattered. In the process of achieving greatness, he remade himself into a paradox: universally known, yet distant and unknowable.
 
Blending dramatic game action with grand evocations of the social forces sweeping the early nineties, Jumpman demonstrates how the man and the myth together created the legend we remember today. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541675650
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	59,758
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Johnny Smith is the J. C. “Bud” Shaw Professor of Sports History and associate professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of five books, including Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X (written with Randy Roberts). He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Editorial Reviews

09/11/2023

Smith (The Sons of Westwood), a history professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, justifies yet another book about Jordan by offering a smart appraisal of the superstar’s relationship with race. Jordan avoided discussing racism and politics during his NBA career in a bid to “appear more likable to people living under the illusion that the nation had solved its racial dilemmas,” Smith argues, noting that in 1990 Jordan, who had his own sneaker line with Nike, justified not endorsing Black Democratic senatorial candidate Harvey Gantt against racist incumbent Jesse Helms with the comment, “Republicans buy shoes, too.” Smith argues that Jordan downplayed to the press the ways in which racism shaped his life; he writes that Jordan has omitted in accounts of his youth that he was enraged by the prejudice he faced attending a newly desegregated high school in Wilmington, N.C., in the late 1970s and took to the court as a means of “disproving any notion of weakness or inferiority.” Smith places Jordan’s apoliticism in context, describing how O.J. Simpson and Julius Erving sought to present themselves as “colorless” to better appeal to white America. Jordan remains something of an enigma throughout, but readers will come away with a better sense of how that mystery was a product of the Hall of Famer’s aspirations for universal admiration. It’s a fascinating account of how Jordan navigated America’s fraught racial politics during his rise to the top. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Fascinating… Rich.”—Wall Street Journal

“Intriguing… a swift, fascinating read.” —Chicago Tribune

"An impressive job of putting Mr. Jordan into historical context."—The Economist

“A smart appraisal of the superstar’s relationship with race. … It’s a fascinating account of how Jordan navigated America’s fraught racial politics during his rise to the top.”—Publishers Weekly

“The book will appeal to fans of Jordan, the Bulls, and the NBA of the 1980s and 1990s, as the author provides interesting backstories about team, league, and corporate figures who surrounded Jordan, particularly his opportunistic agent David Falk, greedy Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, and paranoid general manager Jerry Krause.”—Kirkus

“Recommended.”—Booklist

“Other Michael Jordan books have shown the whats and wheres and whys. Now Jumpman, an essential addition to the canon, explains what it all cost.”—Wright Thompson, senior writer, ESPN.com

“In Jumpman, author Johnny Smith distills the mythology of a sports legend and gives us a story not only about His Airness, but, more broadly, about America.” —Gary M. Pomerantz, author of The Last Pass

“Jumpman is a thought-provoking portrait of the 1990s culture that shaped Michael Jordan into one of the most talked-about athletes the world has ever known. Thanks to Smith for shedding new light on the man, the myth, the legend—the GOAT.”—Timothy Bella, author of Barkley

“Through careful research and rich storytelling, Jumpman does more than just unpack the mystique of Michael Jordan; it paints a lively and unvarnished portrait of the players and personalities who defined that era of professional basketball. By centering questions of race and examining the shifting business of sport, Smith also provides us with a provocative parable about US culture and politics in the late-twentieth century: a time when colorblindness, conservativism, and neoliberal global capitalism came to reshape the American Dream.”—Theresa Runstedtler, author of Black Ball

From the Publisher

2023-08-29
The ascendance of Michael Jordan in American culture.

Smith, a professor of sports history and author of The Sons of Westwood, takes his title from the silhouetted figure based on Nike’s Air Jordan poster of the NBA star soaring to the hoop against the backdrop of the Chicago skyline, a 1987 creation that is now ubiquitous. The author examines the endorsement deals, particularly with Nike and Gatorade, that made Jordan an iconic presence, contrasting this stature with Jordan's often-contentious relationships with coaches, team executives, and teammates as he led the Chicago Bulls to their first championship in 1991. Smith makes great use of secondary sources to examine Jordan's "double consciousness" as a Black man with incomparable crossover appeal to white America and the unintended expectations and consequences that accompanied that status. He leans heavily on other books, including Sam Smith's The Jordan Rules and Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops, to delve into the hypercompetitive Jordan's on-court rivalries with the Detroit Pistons and Los Angeles Lakers en route to the pinnacle of the NBA. The book will appeal to fans of Jordan, the Bulls, and the NBA of the 1980s and 1990s, as the author provides interesting backstories about team, league, and corporate figures who surrounded Jordan, particularly his opportunistic agent David Falk, greedy Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, and paranoid general manager Jerry Krause. Relying heavily on secondary sources and following in the wake of the wildly popular documentary The Last Dance and the film Air, the book does not break new ground or offer particularly profound insights. The lack of deeper explorations of the similarities of Jordan's circumstances and personality to sports stars like Joe DiMaggio, who also reached rarified air in the American consciousness at severe personal expense, leaves readers with a sense of opportunities missed.

A thoroughly sourced compilation of familiar material.

Kirkus Reviews