This Is Why Jordan Is Jordan

I promised Michael Jordan I wouldn't mention this until the season was over. Now I think it's time.

It's time because I feel that the inevitable Jordan backlash may be forming. In this country we love nothing better than to build people up to incredible heights, then happily knock them down. Jordan has reached a level of admiration and public respect unprecedented in recent years. So soon enough you can expect the attempts at destruction to begin.

There are hints already: grumblings about how much money he makes, criticisms of his decision not to play in his second Olympics, remarks about appearances in show business. The first journalist to really rip into Jordan is sure to make a national name for himself.

So now, with the championship season over, I want to tell this story.

Early last season, I wrote a column about a random act of kindness I had seen Jordan do to a disabled child outside the Stadium after a game.

The day after the column ran, I got a call from a man in the western suburbs. He said:" I read what you wrote about Jordan, and I thought I should tell you what I saw."

Here it comes, I thought. It always does. Write something nice about a person, and people call you up to say that the person is not so nice.

What the caller said, though, was this: He and his wife had been to a Bulls game, and their car had broken down. They'd had to wait about 45 minutes after the end of the game to get a cab ride to the suburbs.

"We were four blocks from the Stadium in a bad area, and at one corner under a streetlight was Jordan's car," the man said. "He was standing outside the car, talking with some boys from the neighborhood. It was late at night, and they were just talking. I thought it was nice of him, but I wonder why he stopped."

A few weeks later Jordan and I were talking about something else before a game, and I brought up what the man had said. Was the man right? Had Jordan really been talking to those two boys in that grim neighborhood?

"Not two boys," Jordan said. "But four."

And he named them. He said four names.

"How do you remember their names?" I said.

"Because I see them every night," he said.

"The same four boys?" I said.

"Yes," Jordan said. He said that the year before, he'd seen them waiting outside the Stadium in terrible weather, wanting a glimpse of the Bulls as they arrived for a game.

"I said, 'Don't wait out there, come inside,'" Jordan said. "So I brought them in with me to the game."

They live four blocks away from the Stadium, an area that can be dismal and dangerous, and that offers many of its young residents little hope, if any hope at all.

"Now they wait for me on that corner every night," he said.

Every night? Why?

He smiled. "If I don't stop, I'll go home knowing they're waiting for me anyway," he said. "If you knew my four guys you'd know that they're going to be out there whether it's raining or snowing ... they're there."

And what do they talk about?

"Everything," Jordan said. "Anything. I've asked to see their grades so that I can check to see they're paying attention to their schoolwork. If it turns out one or two of them may need tutoring, I make sure they get it."

No publicity agent alerted me to this; no public-relations man let me know about it. It's just one more part of Michael Jordan's life—one more thing that no one knows about, one more thing Jordan does right. The season is over now, and those boys have their memories. So do I; when the expert commentators begin to turn against Jordan, as they surely will, I'll think about those boys under the streetlight, waiting for the man they know will come. For someone they can depend on.