During the course of Bill Bradley's recent and all too easily extinguished presidential campaign the candidate made many mistakes. Few of them baffled the American public as much as Bradley's decision to take the input of Michael Jordan lightly.
Having spoken, hoops-icon-to-hoops-icon, to Jordan, and persuaded him to end a lifetime of political fence-sitting, Bradley had scored a coup. The political thoughts of Michael Jordan, an outsize celebrity residing in one of America's most politicised cities, consisted of two quotes: When told of the operation of sweatshops by his sponsor, Nike, Jordan had delivered a shrug. When asked to back a black Chicago democrat in a local political race he had noted that Republicans buy sneakers too.
For Bradley, Jordan made a simple face-to-camera campaign advertisement. He spoke of the sort of America he believed in. It could have been a campaign landmark. Instead, Bradley kept the ad under wraps for five weeks until his campaign was dead in the water. His touch was so leaden that, famously one morning, while surrounded by schoolchildren on a campaign stop he snapped at a reporter who lobbed him a feather-ball question about his friendship with Jordan. If Bradley had chosen to undermine the credibility of Santa Claus the kid's faces couldn't have fallen faster.
You can be the nicest man in America but if you wilfully muff your minutes with Michael Jordan you are out of touch with your nation's groove. Bradley duly expired and was carried home on his shield to New Jersey. Jordan got on with his new life as general manager of the Washington Wizards basketball franchise. Bill Clinton came to see his first game in charge, an act of homage. Clinton has the touch that Bradley lacked.
Playing for Keeps was written before Jordan's brief political debut, which deprives us of an interesting epilogue to a fine book. Halberstam's admiration for Jordan is immense and fierce but he is too astute a writer to skip over the problem of Jordan's larger identity and contribution. It is taken for granted that athletically Jordan was one of a kind, a balletic genius with a core personality of pure competitiveness, a man with such cold self-confidence that he was able to end his career with a championship-winning play of unsurpassed audacity and verve.
Yet those who make claims for his greatness have always wanted more from Jordan the person. Jordan's career was a dot-to-dot of epic sporting moments. He used that career to make money as a corporate shill. In terms of playing for keeps, in terms of legacy, that choice shrank him.
Michael Jordan glided into the American consciousness in 1982 with a game-winning shot right on the buzzer to win the national collegiate championships for North Carolina. He exited 16 years later with a championship-winning shot similar in character but even greater in skill and significance. In between he hovered over the American consciousness like a massive storm front always threatening to be something more significant than a sportsman or a rich man.
He rewrote many rules. He became bigger than his sport, he re-invented the business of celebrity endorsement to the extent that when he ended a brief sabbatical as a baseball player and returned to basketball, the Dow Jones index leapt above the rim. By being so much better than the second best basketball player in the world he turned the consummate team sport into a pedestal for solo performances.
Yet last December when ESPN, the American sports network, voted Jordan as the athlete of the century there was quiet unease. Off the court Jordan's principle achievement has been the accumulation of wealth and while Jordan referred to the companies whose products he endorsed as his "partners" even he knew perhaps that he was diminished by his fealty to the market. This after all is the man who draped an American flag over his shoulders to hide a Reebok logo during the medal ceremony at the 1992 Olympic Games. Jordan was a Nike man.
Halberstam is old enough to remember the social impact of other athletes - men like Muhammad Ali, Arthur Ashe, Jackie Robinson - whose grace and courage changed the world around them and not just the game they played in. They had the stature to be as selfish as an athlete needs to be and as generous as a hero should be.
Jordan won't be celebrated or remembered in a similar way. In mitigation Halberstam records Ashe's remark that being a black athlete was like having a second job. As a man Jordan looked after himself and his own interests with an athlete's insularity. His statement about race was to have a career which ignored it. He never felt as if he needed the second job.
Much, too much indeed, has been written about Jordan in the last few years. Halberstam succeeds in being better and in being different through the rigour of his journalism and the breadth of his ambition. Jordan declined to co-operate with the book and the end product is better for his lack of input. Halberstam has attempted to tell the whole story and to establish a context for it. In all the ways that matter he has succeeded.
Jordan has the rest of his life to fill out and, as an epilogue, become the man Halberstam wistfully hints he could become.
Tom Humphries is an Irish Times journalist