Jordan and Mammon take on the world

Michael Jordan and the New Capitalism by Walter LaFeber (Norton, #19.99) Even after Michael Jordan had retired from basketball, temporarily in 1993 and permanently in 1998, he was still the highest earner in professional sports. Not through his salary, of course, but through his unparalleled career as a commercial pitchman.

There are few Americans who can make it through a day without consuming or using a product that Jordan has endorsed big-time: Chevrolet, McDonalds, Nike, Coca Cola, Oakley Sunglasses, Wilson Sporting Goods, Wheaties and those are just the more well-known names.

When the Asian stock market crash took its toll on Nike sales two years ago, Jordan's product line alone continued to soar, salvaging the company's 36% share of the world market in sports equipment. At that time, Fortune magazine estimated the Great Endorser had a $10bn annual impact on the US economy alone - and that was small beer compared to the global sales which his face fronted.

Forget Bill Gates and Stephen Spielberg. Only one figure has effortlessly embodied the stratospheric career of American cultural exports - from black urban swagger to fast food junkiedom and sports triumphalism - and escaped unscathed.

Just as a fistful of companies have hitched their fortunes to Jordan's star, so Walter LaFeber finds many stories to tie in with the ascent of Jordan in this timely and accessible book. He recounts the decline of basketball from its feisty status as the sport of the "New Deal coalition" of urban Jews, Catholics and blacks to its mid- 1980s disrepute as violent, drug-ridden and "too black". Then he charts its transformation, through Jordan, into the most glamorous and widely watched TV sport in the world.

The explosion of satellite and cable broadcasting is a crucial element of that story - an explosion in which media barons like Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch gobbled up sports teams and sports channels as primary fuel for their high-octane pursuit of global audiences and vertical integration. As a result we now live in a world where clubs are fined when their players refuse to grant press interviews, and where Olympic athletes such as Jordan and others in the 1992 Dream Team choose loyalty to companies like Nike or Reebok rather than to the countries they represent.

Another part of LaFeber's picture involves offshore manufacturing by US multinationals in sweatshops from Indonesia to Haiti. Now that garment and sportswear companies like Nike are ceaselessly chasing the lowest wages in the world, the labour abuses in their factories can no longer be hidden from the scrutiny of the global news media, hungry for notable exposes among their corporate rivals. The overarching story, however, is about the "soft power" of American cultural imperialism, inexorably moulding the world's rich diversity of languages, customs, costumes and diets into a universal monoculture of Anglo-speaking, Swoosh-wearing, Coke-swilling, burger- chomping wiseguys.

Jordan is justly at the centre of these stories - not simply because of his matchless performances as athlete and hawker, but rather because he is untouchable. Athlete endorsers are habitually silenced by their corporate contracts; Jordan consistently avoided speaking out on a myriad of issues and controversies that have raged around him and the corporate company he has kept. The storm over Nike's Asian sweatshops was bad enough. What was worse was the fact that Jordan - paid as much, at $20m, as the entire Asian workforce - was simply said to be "looking into it".

Closer to home was the plight of inner city African-American kids, driven by peer pressure to steal and kill for the privilege of wearing Air Jordans. In response, His Airness made a slightly cheaper shoe. In contrast to other black athletes like Arthur Ashe, outspoken in his demands for racial equality, or Pele, who lambasted Nike for its "corruption" of Brazilian soccer, Jordan has kept his silence - and it has been deafening.

Yet what LaFeber misses is the precise flavour of Jordan's invulnerability to criticism. In the waning years of the century, only a brash, strong-minded black American male with a squeaky-clean lifestyle could enjoy the immunity that corporate capitalism craved. Jordan guaranteeing the loyalty of the pioneer consumer market of black teenage tastemakers at the same time as he massaged the family values market for the McDonalds and Disney mainstream.

Jordan could deliver so well for the company suits because he was so obviously a virtuoso performer on his home turf - the basketball court - and not some manufactured, cultivated frontman. All the same, his invulnerability has proved to be deeply ironic. This is society where young black men face endless assaults on their self-esteem from all quarters. Not even Bill Cosby, Jordan's only rival in the national field as a positive black role model and celebrity pitchman (OJ Simpson, of course, is another story) could escape public barneys about racial and economic justice.

LaFeber's stoic tracking of Jordan sets the stage where, ultimately, for a new global battlefield, global Americanisation at war with older cultures. Here, the author shows his true colours as a practitioner of diplomatic history - a field deeply formed by the bipolar thinking of the Cold War.

Bereft of the comforting framework of the dual superpower conflict, historians of international relations have been casting about for some new grand antagonism - thereby mirroring the Pentagon's own desperate search for a new enemy. Samuel Huntington's clunky "clash of civilisations" (Christianity vs other religions) is briefly considered. But LaFeber prefers a secular brawl between capital and culture, where he sees market-driven forces gaining the upper hand, vanquishing the social and geographical differences that distinguish the world's peoples.

After maintaining a somewhat frustrating neutrality for most of the book, LaFeber finally observes that this might not be such a good thing. But readers more than familiar with anxieties about Americanisation are not going to be overwhelmed by this faint- hearted conclusion. Tales of Jordan's derring-do at the hoops lead us to expect more heroic feats on the author's part.

Andrew Ross is director of the American Studies program at New York University

Copyright 1999
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