On Michael Jordan and the value of access

Wright Thompson's ESPN The Magazine article on Michael Jordan at 50 is getting plenty of praise, and deservedly so. Thompson paints an excellent, nuanced portrait of Jordan, highlighting both how he's changed and how he hasn't since he quit playing. In order to do this, Thompson gains plenty of access to Jordan's life and his inner circle, and he uses it well: there's plenty of insight in his piece into what drives Jordan, and it's a worthy read. However, while reading it, I couldn't help but think back to an earlier magazine piece on Jordan, Brett Popplewell's December profile in Sportsnet Magazine. Both pieces are well worth your time, and they highlight different aspects of Jordan, so it's not like we have to unequivocally declare that one is better. However, if I had to choose just one piece I'd recommend to someone curious about Jordan's post-playing career, I'd go with Popplewell's. That might surprise many, as unlike Thompson's, it doesn't contain a single quote Jordan gave Popplewell.

Access has often been seen as one of the holy grails of journalism, and for good reason. It can be extremely useful to hear what players and coaches are thinking, to hear their rationale on why they made the decisions they did and to try and understand them as people. Moreover, access of the sort Thompson had can be the most valuable; spending more time with a subject than a quick interview in a locker room can be extremely useful, as can seeing how they behave at home and how they interact with friends. Some of my favourite sports books have followed these lines, spending a season around a team and portraying how they behave on and off the court; a few examples include Jack McCallum's Seven Seconds Or Less, David Halberstam's The Breaks Of The Game and one I'm currently reading, Roy Blount Jr.'s Three Bricks Shy Of A Load. In all of those cases, the authors used their access effectively to portray the teams and characters they covered in a deep way, and the books are better for it.

However, there's often a lot of value to pieces written with little or no access to their subject as well, and that's what stands out about Popplewell's piece. It's an extremely well-researched, well-written look at Jordan after his playing career, and it gets there without a single quote from the man himself. In many ways, it's better for not having Jordan speak (technically, there's one quote from him, but it's an old one from a 1992 interview). Instead, we hear about him not primarily from the friends and associates Thompson quotes, but from the Bobcats' fans who watch Jordan's team, from the buskers in his city and from Popplewell's own writing. Both articles arguably have Jordan the crazily-intense competitor at their centre, but the accounts of Jordan's behaviour in Thompson's piece are tempered by comments from his inner circle about how critics misunderstand him (particularly, his Hall of Fame speech) and by humanizing, compassionate moments from Jordan himself. Given that this is Jordan we're talking about, it leads me to wonder how much of that's real and how much of that is him applying his legendary competitiveness to "winning the profile". Thompson's piece is no hagiography, and he does a good job of revealing and illuminating Jordan's flaws as well as his strengths, but Popplewell's seems to me to give a more accurate picture of the man.

Is that a call to throw out the old pillar of access, to move all journalism to the Deadspin tagline of "Sports news without access, favor or discretion"? No, it isn't. As mentioned above, there's significant value to access, and significant value to pieces' like Thompson's. I see the takeaway here more as that you can still produce some pretty remarkable journalism with little (while Popplewell didn't interview Jordan, he did interview some people) or no access. There's a long tradition of that in journalism too, as seen in articles such as Gay Talese's famous "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" piece in Esquire and many of the works of another Thompson, Dr. Hunter S. (whose "Fear And Loathing At The Super Bowl" in particular might be my favourite thing ever written about a sports event, despite it including very few quotes from anyone involved). In my mind, that's an inspiring message as well, one to encourage people to get writing and keep writing regardless of if they're working for Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine or just their own independent blog. Not everyone can hang out in Michael Jordan's penthouse, but that doesn't have to stop you from writing something great about him.