Here comes God. He’s coming right at you. He’s humiliating you, in fact. Brutally. Unforgivingly. Any fantasy you once had of a benevolent spirit above has evaporated. This God cares not for your well-being. He cares only for his own glory. You beg for mercy, but he doesn’t seem to hear you. Or maybe he simply doesn’t care.

You had no idea God would be like this. Elegant. Smug. Unrelenting. He seeks not to circumvent you. He seeks to go right through you. And wise men before you have chosen to get out of his way.

But foolishly, you attempt to stand your ground.

The above introduction represents an unpleasant memory for NBA legend Larry Bird. It was the fourth quarter of a game in the 1986 playoffs; Bird and the Boston Celtics were facing off against a young Michael Jordan and his nascent Chicago Bulls. The Bulls were down two, but they were confident. Jordan had the ball in the corner. He calmly surveyed the defense, perhaps lulling the Celtics into sleep-like state. When he saw his opening, Jordan sprang into action, accelerating down the baseline towards the hoop. Bird sensed the impending storm and raced over from the weak side to protect the basket. But when Jordan elevated to an altitude reserved for the almighty, Bird had no chance. Jordan dunked with two hands; I’m not sure he even saw Bird trying to block the shot. It looked easy. And maybe it was. MJ had been dominating Boston all night. The Celtics won that game, but Jordan poured in an NBA playoff record 63 points. Afterwards, Bird said that the young man who had just plowed through Boston must have been “God disguised as Michael Jordan”.

The divine comparison has persisted. When the great Shaquille O’Neal was asked what it was like to play against Michael, Shaq said he felt like he was “on the same court with God.” Superstar Kevin Durant has called Jordan “a God-level player.” Legendary rival Magic Johnson admitted, “There is Michael Jordan, and then there is the rest of us.” And the adulation is not confined to hoops stars; Five For Fighting’s John Ondrasik has called Michael the “ultimate God” and Playboy once called him “a down-to-earth levitating demigod.” Even those in Jordan’s personal life have bought in; ESPN reported in 2003 that Jordan’s security team had a codename for him: Yahweh.

I could go on.

After all, even Jordan’s biggest challenger, LeBron James, has thought of Jordan similarly. “It was godly,” James said of meeting MJ. “I’ve said that over and over before, but it was like meeting God for the first time.”

Of course, LeBron has invested a lifetime in reaching the same rarefied air as Jordan. And as a basketball player, LeBron has made a case for himself. He, like Jordan, is the undisputed hoops conqueror of a generation. He, like Jordan, has had both the team and individual success to bolster his case. But who was more dominant—MJ or LeBron? The debate rages on talk shows, but it remains one-sided in Michael’s favor. Jordan’s many fanatics will smugly point to the number of championships he won, and his perfect record in the NBA Finals. LeBron’s backers will point to James’ accumulated career statistics and try to counter that he played in a more competitive era. But all of LeBron’s defenders are in denial of the final truth: that unlike Michael Jordan, LeBron James is human. He is imperfect. Just like you. Just like me.

For the standard American sports fan, the distinction is clear. Jordan played his whole career (at least the parts we care to remember) for one team. He won three championships consecutively and then, in the wake of his father’s devastating murder, shockingly retired in the midst of his prime. Then he returned after a year and a half out of the league, and promptly won three more titles in a row. His career trajectory might as well have been scribbled on James Cameron’s napkin. Jordan oozes the confidence and glory we crave in our biggest stars. He knows what it takes to win, even when the rest of us cannot see it.

Why did he never lose a championship round? Because Jordan was perfect.

LeBron, however, made the regrettable decision of abandoning his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers for the flashy Miami Heat. He promised his fans championship jewelry by the handful but has delivered only three rings. We have watched him fail on basketball’s biggest stage, several times. And nothing is more humanizing than public failure.

Jordan, the NBA’s faultless “demigod,” gave us Space Jam. Now LeBron tries to recreate that magic with Space Jam 2. But you cannot facsimile perfection. Let us be honest: it never really mattered what LeBron did. MJ already existed as our collective athletic deity. And there can only be one.

But why can there only be one? Why should we attempt to parse out a hierarchy between these two superstars in the first place? Why our disinterest in a league that has many NBA icons, and obsession with a singular “greatest-of-all-time”?

Do we really need MJ to be perfect?

I am not being tongue-in-cheek when I say that the secret to MJ’s appeal lies in God, and vice versa. Like with the many transcendent NBA legends before Jordan (Magic Johnson, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabar), we used to worship multiple deities simultaneously. But over time, we latched onto the appeal of one.

Why?

We couldn’t help ourselves. After all, the Abrahamic God and Michael Jordan hardly stand alone. History books are littered with “Great Men” who encouraged us to follow them to a more prosperous world. How else would the strongmen leaders of the World War II era have consolidated their power? Strongmen can only become leaders on the promise of their singularity, because inherent to their allure is that they know better than everyone else. And often we believe them. It’s as though we want to believe that history was built on the shoulders of a few “Great Men,” icons who are just smarter, stronger, and more powerful than the rest of us could ever aspire to be. These icons are not simply part of a historical tapestry. They are the whole story.

The Great Man Theory does not much care for Chicago Bulls’ greats like Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Horace Grant, or Phil Jackson. But they might have had something to do with the Bulls’ success. In 2020, ESPN ranked Scottie Pippen as the 21^st best player ever. Of all the players on that list whose primes reasonably overlapped with Michael Jordan’s—Pippen is 4^th. He too was better than most of Jordan’s rivals. And they were on the same team. Further, Bleacher Report has rated Phil Jackson as the greatest NBA coach in the history of the game. And that seems reasonable, given that Jackson went on to win five additional championships with other players once he separated from Michael. Jackson would retire as the NBA’s most decorated coach ever. And Rodman and Grant? NBA All-Stars. And they too had success both with, and without, MJ.

Of course, the Bulls won all the time. None of Jordan’s equals had a number two like Scottie or a coach like Phil. But those details are off-message. If we were honest, it would be evident that two things are true: 1) Jordan succeeded because of his supporting cast and 2) Jordan’s supporting cast succeeded because of him. But many people have never heard of Scottie Pippen. Because if one of MJ’s comrades had been too notably responsible for the successes of the 1990s’ Chicago Bulls, then they would deserve some of the credit, and Jordan would no longer be perfect. He would be a guy who was a part of an awesome team. And we need Jordan to be the team.

That’s the problem with perfection; if you take just one card away from it, the whole house falls.

Let’s look past the “Great Men” themselves. Because it’s almost too trite, and uncomplicated, to consider why they would want us to believe in their perfection. More intriguing is this query: why do we choose to believe it? You may have come across an easy answer to this before, which is that we all want to be flawless like Michael Jordan. After all, we mimicked his movements. We worked on our fadeaways. We spent hundreds to wear his sneakers. We devoured the “Be Like Mike” advertising campaign. Nike told us that we should adore him. We listened.

But it would be too damning of our intelligence to say that casual basketball fans were actually trying to obtain the abilities of the greatest player in a generation. We aren’t stupid. We knew that his shoes wouldn’t make us jump higher. We knew that being “Like Mike” was an illusion. But it didn’t matter. We bought in anyway.

It is the very existence of the Great Man, like Jordan, that proves to us that we ourselves cannot become one. The Great Man can only be seen as perfect when juxtaposed with our imperfect race. And we are staunch in our belief in our own imperfection. For this reason, we flocked to religions that declared us deficient. Indeed, those religions informed us that perfection lies only in God, and that it is not achievable by us. Yet somehow, we take that taunt as inspiration.

How?

There are both evolutionary and social reasons as to why we might clutch tightly the idea of a Great Man leading us through the darkness. Maybe it starts at the beginning. For instance, a baby who is distrustful of their parents’ intentions might not accept the nutrition their body needs, whereas one who believes in their parents’ infallibility will embrace the breastmilk. Throughout our early years, the stronger our belief that mother knows best, the more likely we are to survive. Because she does know best, and we simply are not born with the tools and knowledge required for survival without her.

And in childhood, as we continue to defer to our parents, we continue to survive. The belief in their infallibility only further ingrains. At some point, of course, we do realize that our parents are not perfect. But by then it’s too late. We’ve been swaddled within someone else’s faultlessness for too long. At that point, you can’t just tell us to take over. If we’ve learned anything on a subconscious level, it is our own insufficiency. We know how little we know.

Obviously, we eventually do things like drive cars, buy homes and raise children—on our own. But maybe starting from this place of believed insufficiency leaves us craving that perfect being who protected us as infants. Our parents turned out to be imperfect, but God can still be omniscient and omnipotent, right? And if we believe that we aren’t good enough to make our own way, why wouldn’t we hope that there is some entity guiding us? And why wouldn’t we want them to have all the answers?

Who wants to learn from the imperfect?

So we placed Michael Jordan on a pedestal. We declared him flawless. But did we ask ourselves beforehand whether he actually was? On a basketball court, MJ certainly seems both omnipotent and omniscient. But Jordan was just as famous for being an ego-centric bully. ESPN’s Wright Thompson called that “the ugly side of greatness.” Specifically, Thompson recalled that Jordan would “moo” when the Bulls’ overweight general manager entered the team bus, and that he ridiculed and even physically attacked his own teammates—punching more than one of them in the head. Thompson also wrote that years after Jordan retired, on his private plane, if MJ happened to be waking up as the rest of his family and friends were settling down to sleep, he would turn on the lights and blast music. “If Michael is up, the unwritten rule goes, everybody is up.”

No one in Jordan’s orbit is immune to his selfishness. Bulls beat writer Sam Smith details in his famous book The Jordan Rules how Jordan mocked Scottie Pippen for the most embarrassing public failure of his career. In 1990, Pippen, Jordan, and the Bulls were playing in their biggest moment yet, Game 7 of the conference finals, against their nemesis—the Detroit Pistons. The big game was played less than one month after Pippen’s wheelchair-bound father had passed. During the game, Pippen was suffering from a migraine that was so bad it impaired his vision. Scottie fought through the pain for the sake of his team, but he played terribly. He missed all but one of his shots. The Bulls lost and were eliminated from the playoffs. Pippen was swiftly derided by hoops fans and sportswriters for what they called his “migraine game.” It was probably the most humiliating moment of Pippen’s professional career, right on the heels of his father’s death.

The following season, when Pippen played poorly in a loss to those same Pistons, Jordan saw an opportunity to remind him of that night. “Headache tonight, Scottie?” he mocked.

Did that snide comment advance a common goal? Scottie Pippen was the Bulls’ unifier. He was kind and patient to his teammates. After MJ tore you down, Scottie was the one who lifted you back up. He’d tell you that you were going to be okay. Any united group needs a leader like Scottie Pippen that that everyone can agree on. In real life, leaders like Michael Jordan are divisive. Because strongmen are only necessary for unquestioning followers who are willing to risk friendship, love, and happiness for a trophy next June.

Scottie Pippen is beloved by his old Bulls comrades. Most of those same teammates have not remained close with Jordan.

And why should they? The Jordan Rules goes on to report that Jordan ridiculed the other Bulls’ inabilities to meet MJ’s world-class standards. Michael mocked the Bulls’ power forward for not rebounding well enough, proclaiming that his position should be changed to the “powerless forward.” He assailed another teammate with a distinguished surname for not being valuable enough to live up to it. Former teammate Jud Buechler says, “We were his teammates, and we were afraid of him. And there was just fear. The fear factor of MJ was so, so thick.” This is not surprising to NBA fans; Jordan’s abusiveness is part of his legend.

But we pardon abuse when it’s from God. Famed ESPN commentator Michael Wilbon writes that in watching a Michael Jordan documentary with his son, he saw a chance to impart an important lesson. When Wilbon’s son watched Jordan berate his colleagues in front of the cameras, he asked his dad if yelling like that actually helped his teammates. Wilbon makes it very clear, to his son and to us, that the abuse was good for them. “Yes, I told him,” Wilbon writes. “Yes, it helped. Direct cause and effect.”

Nothing to be said of the psychological damage caused by having a leader humiliate you in front of your peers. Day after day. Season after season. Punching you in the face and calling you fat.

Nothing to be questioned of a God who directs you to sacrifice all in the name his personal glory, and then himself collects the accolades upon your joint success. We question our God when we lose our homes, or our jobs, or our loved ones. But we defer to his perfection. “He killed my baby,” we say. “But, certainly, he must have a reason.”

Because what if he didn’t?

Why can’t Michael Wilbon believe that the Bulls achieved success in spite of Jordan’s egotism and cruelty? By the end of their run, those Chicago Bulls had overcome many obstacles: the “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons, player contract disputes, a widespread hatred of their executive management. Why couldn’t they have overcome some of their best player’s shortcomings too? Let me be clear: it is completely unfair to publicly dissect Jordan’s flaws, as I have done here. No one can be expected to be actually perfect. And in real life, Michael Jordan is probably a very nice man.

But I don’t know him. Neither do you. The man we do know is the legend. And how we reckon with that legend is what matters to the world we live in.

If we are going to use it as inspiration, it is important to parse out the details of his celebrity. Because what kind of leader are we requesting when we deify each and every aspect of a man as spiteful as the Michael Jordan we met in The Jordan Rules? What atrocities do we normalize when we disallow hatred of an omnipotent God who murders our newborn?

With Gods like these—you’d think we’d prefer to live in an imperfect world, created by no singular entity. But we don’t. We want to believe in perfection even if we can’t understand it ourselves. Especially if we can’t understand it. Michael Jordan’s perfection would be cheapened by our ability to grasp it. We believe, and want to believe, that we are too insufficient to comprehend what perfection would even look like. We want to believe that its definition eludes us. Because if we could come up with the definition ourselves, it would be just as insufficient as we are. We can’t ask ourselves “why do we think Michael Jordan was perfect?”

Because we don’t know. We don’t even want to know.

We just want God to know. And if he says he does, we will believe him. Because our biggest fear is that we are behind the wheel of our own car.

There he is again. God. It’s his night. He’s at the podium. He’s talking about you, and the crowd laughs at your expense. God brought you here today, literally flew you out here and put you up for the night. He wants you to see his ocean of admirers. He wants to point their gaze to you. He is going to shame you one last time.

Michael Jordan was famously cut from his high school’s varsity basketball team as a sophomore. Instead of Michael, the coach selected a young man named Leroy Smith. Decades later, when MJ was selected to the Basketball Hall of Fame, by then widely regarded as the greatest basketball player in the history of the sport, he flew Leroy out for his induction ceremony, just so he could point to him and remind his high school coach that he had made a mistake in choosing Leroy over him.

I suspect that the coach might have already figured that out by then. But Jordan wasn’t convinced. And he needed to be absolutely certain.

In Wright Thompson’s piece about MJ from 2003, he visits His Airness as he is about to turn 50. Thompson spends the day with him. He watches Jordan as he watches ESPN. Jordan listens closely as the talking heads consider whether current superstar quarterback Tom Brady might be as good as the legendary Joe Montana. Michael vents about the media being plagued by recency bias. He “fumes” when LeBron James gets compared to the great Oscar Robertson. He is frustrated. He wants to convince Thompson that LeBron James would not have had the same success in Jordan’s time. He wants to convince Thompson that he knows how he could stop LeBron, if only he had the chance.

He hates that we don’t know that he could do it.

That day, Thompson shares that Jordan is still awake into the early hours of the morning, long after LeBron’s game has ended. Jordan’s wife went to sleep hours ago. His personal assistant and best friend, George Koehler, has gone to bed as well. Jordan hates being alone. He hates sleeping. He turns on the TV to fall asleep, finally dozing off in front of an old Western that he’s seen many times before.

Maybe that night, Jordan dreamed of playing one on one with LeBron. Maybe there, things work out just as he told us they would: Jordan forces LeBron to his left, and LeBron tries a jumper—clank. Jordan shrugs to his adoring fans as if to say, “I told you so.” And the crowd of everymen goes wild.

But the everyman is fortunate too. Because when we wake up, we don’t have to spend every second trying to authenticate our greatness to the world. We can relax. We have no need to desperately remind anyone of our perfection. That is God’s burden. Maybe it’s better not to be like Mike after all.