Sideline Cut/Keith Duggan:Despite searching exhaustively for 48 hours, it is impossible to find a bad word to say about San Diego. Just as everyone promised, it is a very pretty city.

The weather is straight from The Truman Show, with perfectly regulated warmth offset by pleasant sea breezes. In their wilder moments, the locals tell tales of five days of straight rainfall and, momentarily, their features darken at the thought of such cruel monsoons.

But mostly, San Diego's days are gorgeous and this appears to have the knock-on effect of rendering its citizens charming and friendly and disconcertingly polite.

This hotel in which we are staying was the most expensive in America when built in 1970, and its many former guests include Margaret Thatcher and the Doobie Brothers, though possibly not at the same time and almost definitely not in the same room. The rooms, incidentally, are obscenely and brilliantly large, wide enough to stage a bicycle race. In fact, several of its current guests already have.

There are a tremendous variety of cultural and sporting pursuits on offer in San Diego, and of course we are filled with the lofty intention of exploring the city in full. The fear is, however, that America's great evil and its great attraction will prove too great.

These are particularly fascinating days to trawl through the US's endless and frequently terrible television channels. Despite the 50 channels, the choices are stark: sport or war, and often it is hard to tell the difference between the two.

On one station there was a punchy news segment about the countdown to the Super Bowl, while on the other side they were talking in equally bouncy tones about the countdown to war.

On Fox news, Adam Howsley was excited to be reporting from the Kuwait desert on the live warfare drills being carried out by the marines. To hammer home the gravity of the situation, he brandished a kind of bazooka thing and asked the anchor in studio if she thought the accessory made a good babe magnet.

You start flicking for five minutes and before you know it one and two hours have passed. On Thursday afternoon, around the time all the news channels started going berserk about the weapons finds in Iraq, TNT had a live showing of a basketball game featuring Michael Jordan.

Still America's great sporting icon and considered by some to be the most astonishing athletic figure of the last century, it is doubtful that Jordan has any opinion to offer on the question of whether his country should go to war.

Frequently cited alongside Muhammad Ali as the sports person that has touched most people's lives, Jordan is as stridently apolitical as Ali was passionate and outspoken.

I NEVER cared much for Jordan back when he was globally revered and was playing not so much against opponents as the actual game of basketball. Despite walking away from the sport for two years in his prime, for much of the 1990s it genuinely appeared as if he had beaten the sport, as if he were its master and could do whatever he chose on floors all across the country.

The counter argument was that because his leaving and returning to the NBA had huge repercussions on Wall Street - because he carries more economic and marketing clout than many small nations - he got treated with kid gloves in games. Also, there was no great opponent during his era, no McEnroe to his Borg.

Jordan's pronouncements always seemed too glib and his career story was just that bit too smooth, too polished, even to the perfect ending in 1998 when he landed a jump shot to win the NBA final in game six against the Utah Jazz. It was his last shot as a player and he walked away with the most assured and untarnished legacy in American sport.

Of course, now there is a school of revision on that shot and people are actually starting to voice what was blatantly obvious: that he illegally pushed off against his opponent to set his balance just as he went to shoot. And of course it wasn't his final shot anyway because Jordan was bored by the perfect ending and has come back for a third time.

And now, it is impossible to find him anything but fascinating. Now it's worth having seeing him play in the flesh at the top of your wish-list.

He looks almost exactly the same, except his physique has lost something of the feline quality that was the patent on the atrociously beautiful assaults he made on the hoop. He is slightly but tellingly chunkier, and when he first came back commentators indulged a certain sly delight in calling him Floor Jordan.

Plus, he wears a moustache that is only slightly less ostentatious than that sported by Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York. Amidst all the tattoos and corn-rows, Jordan looks what he is: a guy from an older generation.

To consider that he is almost 40 and still excelling at a game in which the average age profile is half that is unbelievable. This year, Jordan is averaging 20 points a game, modest by the totals he regularly contributed, but against Orlando on Thursday he landed 20 in the first quarter alone. And this against a team starring Treacy McGrady and Grant Hill, both labelled at various times as the "Air" to his throne.

JORDAN'S refusal to play ball - or rather to stop playing ball - has angered the same commentators who knelt at his feet, and while his personal life has never had the full scent of roses, people are not outwardly stating that it stinks. They are saying that maybe MJ is not quite the great guy that he would have been remembered as if had he obediently faded with the sunset.

And Jordan lets them bitch and just gets on the way he always has: by playing basketball as hard and as often as he can. It is not surprising that he has no strong opinions on life beyond the court because, more than any athlete, he is one without a conscience. In the last seconds of the first quarter, with 18 points to his name, Jordan clawed the ball away from a young opponent and hared the length of the court for another score, which he made after being fouled. There he was, tongue hanging out and eyes bright with greed. His hunger, after all he has achieved, is as magnificent as it is unnatural.

He just never gets bored of winning, of hammering opponents, of scoring, of playing. It looks as if that is all he wants. And although he may not be quite as compelling as in his prime, not so hip with the kids, he remains America's sporting ambassador in these terse and flighty days when all the talk is of going to war.

The only thing Jordan wants to say is that he is refusing to grow old gracefully, that he may well have to be dragged away from his game kicking and screaming. He doesn't soar anymore or run with the mesmerising lightness of old, but boy does he still have the attitude, the meanness.

And in that way he is perfectly suited to this country at this time. This is a tough and unsentimental time and the primary concern is that which has always been Michael Jordan's obsession: winning.

In sport and war, it is the word they use here again and again.