Our Marriage, His Airness

Leave it to my husband, the new bishop, to have a totally offbeat take on that glorious picture of Michael Jordan’s dunk.  This week’s Sports Illustrated (a magazine to which I happily subscribe even with older son off at college) is largely devoted to commemorating the 50^th birthday of His Airness, so the Right Reverend – enjoying a rare day off — got a chance to glance at the image and then express an opinion about it while sitting at the kitchen counter munching on a meal.

In our more than 20 years of marriage, I’ve grown to love and cherish our spirited disagreements about all kinds of things.  This is partly what keeps the sparks flying around here (“here” soon to shift geographical locations, but no matter) if you want to know the truth.  Some differences of opinion are more fun in the going through than others, but like two players out for a catch, we rarely run out of topics to toss around.

So today, there I was, gazing with glee at the picture of Jordan poised in mid-air.  Years ago, one of my big brothers had the same poster mounted on a huge piece of wood which he kindly passed along to our son, so it became a kind of household companion until heading off to grace a college dorm room.   Moved by encountering it again, I read aloud this sentence from the accompanying article by Lee Jenkins:

Jordan is turning 50, but for a generation he will always be 24, suspended under the scoreboard of a Chicago arena that no longer exists, frozen in time, forever in flight. (p. 44)

Apparently not sharing my exhilaration from this uplifting material, my husband said something like, “Oh, that’s so sad!”  After making sure I had heard him correctly, I requested an explanation.  He told me that he thought nobody should be regarded as frozen in time, that life was all about change and growth and moving on –anything but stasis.  We all take the risks that come with having a full life, stumbling and picking ourselves up.  Not stopping there, he went on to quote the famous line from Zorba the Greek:  “I’m a man.  So I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe.”

Not precisely the kind of thing you want to hear from your husband on any given day, especially not right on the heels of Valentine’s Day.

But the real point, it seemed to me, was:  what’s the difference between, on the one hand, celebrating one magical moment and allowing it to continue shedding light long afterwards and, on the other hand, perpetuating a moment – or an incident– that plays over and over like a broken record in someone’s life, preventing progress? Keats captured the whole tension between wanting to freeze life at its fullest and knowing that only art can do this in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Fair youth, beneath the tree, thou canst not leave/ Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare.

Yes, of course, seasons must change and people must age.  And yet, isn’t much of the glory of sports (that realm, at least) to be found in particular moments such as the one which happened on Feb. 6th, 1988, the one that contained Jordan leaping, in an almost extra-human way, to the basket?

I don’t need to remind you how many sports stars have come tumbling down from their pedestals in recent months.  To name just several:  Tiger Woods, Roger Clemens, and of course Lance Armstrong and Oscar Pistorius (let the full facts come out, please).  Why did we ever think that their extraordinary athletic achievements went hand in hand with extraordinary virtue?  It’s curious, as many people have been discussing recently, how important this supposed link has been to our society, even going way back to Classical Greece when athletes were first revered.  Maybe now, with one humiliation after another in the limelight, we’re finally wising up to the fact that athletic accomplishment is really just what it is – no more, no less.

Stefan Fatsis, sports commentator on NPR, put it well the other day when he said that athletic feats are, and have always been, “of the moment” and that the enjoyment we derive from watching sports should not in any way depend on our need to see athletes as heroes in the larger sense.  They excel on that court or in that pool or on that track at a particular time….and that’s enough.  I don’t know about you, but it seems clear to me that no particular group of people, in any occupation, can claim to dominate in the personal virtue department.  Goodness – greatness, even — can be found in all corners and can go almost completely unnoticed, or at least unpublicized.

This week’s Sports Illustrated article on Michael Jordan doesn’t shrink away from the fact that his “postretirement” achievements as a team owner have been lackluster; but, in a way, what wouldn’t look lackluster in comparison to what he did in his prime?  And, re-addressing my husband on this point, do we really need to know that he’s no longer trapped in the image of himself, airborne—the poor soul, direct delivery to the hoop?  By all means let the man paddle calmly into the waters of mid-life, discovering new territory or not, as he pleases.  Don’t press him to talk too much about his past or expect him to be a moral paragon, either.

But I don’t see anything wrong with keeping that picture around for posterity. There are plenty of things in the world that are truly sad; this particular athlete demonstrating the extent of his physical powers, over and over to the world, to me anyway, would not be one of them.

Ah, Michael Jordan!  Ah, marriage over a magazine at the kitchen counter!