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Shooting
Hundreds of Shots Each Day
"The
thing about Michael is he takes nothing about his game for
granted," said Phil Jackson, who shared his six title
rings while coaching the Bulls. "When he first came into
the league in 1984, he was primarily a penetrator. His outside
shooting wasn't up to pro standards. So he put in his gym time
in the offseason, shooting hundreds of shots each day.
Eventually, he became a deadly three-point shooter."
He led the NBA in scoring a record 10 times with a 31.5
points per game average, another all-time mark. What made the
achievement even more remarkable was that he did so while
playing the other end of the floor as well. Nine times he was
named to the NBA's All-Defensive First Team, and in 1988, he
was named NBA Defensive Player of the Year.
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Distinguishing
Personally
As he embarked upon his teardown of the
perception that a supreme scorer could never be a
champion, he was also distinguishing himself personally
from all other athletes. In a 1980s world newly impressed
by ESPN, MTV and the worldwide media explosion, he shaved
his skull, wore audacious red sneakers and let the hem of
his shorts flirt with his knees. He didn't invent the
fashions, just as he didn't invent the smile and the wink,
but he combined all of them in such an engaging manner
that the once-unsightly affectations became trendy, and
his image became nearly as admirable as his unsurpassed
skills.
As his playing career was closing, he created his own line
of cologne and clothing, presuming shrewdly that while no
one can be like Mike exactly, the chance to smell and
dress like him will be, in a world given over to
computer-generated simulations, virtually enough.
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Relative
Humanity...Center of Appeal
While some suggest that Jordan was already
unreachable even for the most active imagination, his relative
humanity is at the center of his appeal. A grandson of a
sharecropper, he was cut from his high school varsity
basketball team as a sophomore, and could not afford his own
bicycle until he was 16. Though his basketball skills are
transcendent, they are not so freakish as to be unfathomable.
He was a shorter, slender man dominating giants, and for that
there is no shortage of projection from millions of people
convinced they were built too closely to the planet surface.
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Throw in eye contact, articulation, a handsome
sexiness and acceptance from Bugs Bunny, and he became a
ubiquitous pitchman who sold tight underwear and baggy
outerwear to a mainstream America that would have
considered such fashion delivered another way as a threat
from the streets.
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