The Meme Misrepresenting Michael Jordan

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If you haven't already, sit back and enjoy today's episode, which dives into how Michael Jordan's greatest ability has been misrepresented by an Internet meme. But first we have to talk about Nelson Mandela. Cue the music, No, no, no, the other one. Sorry, everyone, it's been a while. Let's try that again. Cue the music. In nineteen sixty two, anti apartheid activist and South African politician Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow the government. Some twenty seven years later, Mandela was released by then President F. W. De Clerk in nineteen ninety and the two began negotiating an end to the apartheid. Four years later, Nelson Mandela won a multi racial general election and was elected President of South Africa, a position he would occupy until nineteen ninety nine. According to paranormal researcher Fiona Broom, however, Mandela had died in prison during the eighties. She had vivid memories of the news coverage surrounding his death, and even remembered listening to his widow's televised speech you see in two thousand and nine, Broom had learned that Mendela was still alive. At first, she cast aside her false memories as an odd phenomenon, well until she attended a science fiction and fantasy convention that same year and found out that other attendees had similar memories of Mandela dying one prisoned in the eighties. Not long after, Broom created a website for people to share instances where their own memories of events did not fit with what actually happened, an occurrence she called the Mandella effect. The term became immensely popular, and it's no surprise the rise in popularity coincided with the massive growth of social media and Internet use across the globe. One of the most popular examples of the Mandela effect has to do with Fruit of the Loom, specifically its fruit based logo. The clothing brand has existed since eighteen fifty one, so it shouldn't be surprising to learn that its logo has undergone a number of changes over that time period. The logo has also, unsurprisingly, always depicted a bunch of different fruits, with an apple in the center and two different colored bunches of grapes on either side. One thing the logo has never depicted is a cornicopia, also called a horn of plenty, which looks like a horn filled with flowers and fruit. Yet, according to the sworn statements of tens of thousands of Internet users, Fruit of the Loom's logo absolutely definitely positively included a cornicopia. The issue is that there's no proof to verify these claims the only proof available is proof that there never was a cornucopia. The most famous Mandel effect is also one of the most misquoted movie lines in history. If you haven't watched Star Wars, plug your ears and maybe just watch the movies to avoid these situations. In the future, during a pivotal lightsaber duel between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, Vader, who is Anakin Skywalker, reveals that he is Luke's father. You might have already said the line to yourself by now, but if it starts off with Luke, as in Luke, I am your father, I have some unfortunate news for you. Because Darth Vader actually says, no, I am your father, unlike the mysterious Fruit of the Loom cornucopia. We can actually go back and listen to the line, proving without a doubt that he did say, no, I am your father, which sort of makes it even more baffling that so many people misremember that iconic phrase. This type of Mandela effect, one where a quoter saying is slightly altered, happens all the time. Changing one word here or putting one phrase there might seem unimportant, and it largely is or is it. Sometimes these light changes can compound over time, and suddenly the meaning of the original quote or saying is changed or even worse, completely forgotten. Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, for example, is often attributed with the saying winning is in everything. It's the only thing in actuality. He was repeating the words of a UCLA coach named Red Sanders. Lombardy later told a reporter quote, I wish to hell I'd never said the damned thing. I meant the effort, I meant having a goal. I sure as hell didn't mean for people to crush human values and morality. End quote. It seems like what he really meant to say was that winning is in everything, making the effort to win is, but we don't remember that. While many of these misremembered events and quotes are inconsequential, others are more significant, especially in the modern era of memes, and by memes, I mean photos or screenshots of someone, usually making an odd facial expression, and often with text that person may have said, like a picture of Alan Iverson with the phrase we're talking about practice. Athletes are some of the most memed people on the planet, and my personal hypothesis is that these seemingly innocuous memes often end up as representations of athletes themselves, representations that tend to unfairly paint a one dimensional aspect of that player. That might seem like a stretch, but it's certainly the case for Michael Jordan. If you pold sports fans on which player epitomizes having a killer mentality, I bet whatever money I have on Michael Jordan being the number one reply. His willpower and will to win are legendary, and there are dozens, no hundreds of stories that stress his otherworldly competitive nature. Kobe Bryant, who would be my second guest after Jordan, for whose sports fans would answer the most, is famous for his Mamba mentality and guess who he modeled his game after, yep, Jordan. Perhaps the most infamous example of Michael Jordan's mentality hit the mainstream masses at the peak of the COVID pandemic when everyone was watching The Last Dance, Netflix's hit docuseries recounting the rise and fall of the Chicago Bulls dynasty in the nineteen nineties. While talking about a playoff series against the Indiana Pacers, Jordan mentions that he was being scratched by the Pacers every time he came into the game and says, quote, it became personal with me. End quote. The quote is massively misquoted to the point where it's very frustrating because it's literally like five words, he said it became personal with me, not I took that personally. So boom, there you go. You're now allowed to swiftly and confidently correct anyone online or in person you see using that line wrong. You're welcome. It crushes at parties, trust me. The reason for that slight difference, as you might have guessed, was because the viral meme that spawned from it displays texts saying I took that personally. The phrase just plays better in the meme format. In this instance, at least for now, the two slightly different sayings actually have basically the same meaning. The major fundamental flaw with this meme is not due to the Mandela effect. Its flaw lies in the fact that the entire narrative is wrong. That people wrongly point to Jordan taking things personally as evidence of his killer mentality, the thing that made him great, the thing they claim separates him from more team oriented greats. Why are they so wrong? Well, as it turns out, Michael Jordan, the man who ballhogs and me first mentality players idolize, was a team player. He wouldn't have won six championships if he wasn't. I know, I know that sounds like a wild take, and I will explain it's kind of the whole purpose of the podcast. First, however, I'll quote Michael Jordan himself. Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships. Michael Jordan was selected by the Chicago Bulls with the third overall pick in the nineteen eighty four NBA draft, and describing his rookie season as taking the league by storm would be an understatement. When the eighty two game regular season came to a close, only two players had averaged more points per game than the rookies twenty eight point two, the Knicks Bernard King and Celtics Larry Bird. Jordan was also voted an All Star starter for the Eastern Conference by fans and named the NBA Rookie of the Year. The playoffs were a different story for the Bulls in their star rookie the team lost their first round matchup against the Milwaukee Bucks in four games. Then Jordan missed sixty four games due to a broken foot the following season, which miraculously saw the thirty win fifty two loss Bowls enter the playoffs against the juggernaut Celtics. In a fitting theme for his early years in the league, Jordan averaged an absurd forty three point seven points per game, including a still standing single game playoff record of sixty three points, and the Bulls lost all three games. It's almost inconceivable to imagine the Bulls winning that series against the Celtics. No matter what Jordan did or how he played, it wouldn't matter if he decided to pass the ball more, because sometimes the other team is simply that much better than yours. It's a team sport, and having the best player on the court is pretty meaningless when the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth best players are all on the other team. Plus it's not like Jordan wasn't passing the ball at all. He led the Bulls and assists his rookie year and was second on the team from nineteen eighty six through nineteen eighty nine. As a self admitted lebron James Truther I have certain biases against Jordan, and while I would love to use these examples as evidence of Jordan's inherently ball hog centric nature, that would be unfair. The truth is that, given the roster around him, Jordan squeezed every last ounce of effort ability and will power within him to try and beat the Celtics, and the best way he knew how to do that was by scoring something he was exceptionally gifted at. Is it really inherently selfish for Jordan to do the thing he believed gave the Bulls the best chance at winning? Sure, him believing that the thing that maximized those chances was him taking the most shots might be a bit self confident, but at the time it was also probably true. Jordan's next season, his third in the league, would take the concept to its logical extreme. The shooting guard averaged a league leading thirty seven point one points per game. For comparison, Dominique Wilkins, the second leading scorer that year, averaged eight point one points per game, less than Jordan, and the Bulls three leading scorers after Jordan averaged a combined thirty five point five points per game, still less than Jordan. Sticking with the theme, the playoffs would mirror the previous year and conclude with a first round sweep courtesy of the Celtics. The following three seasons would be different. They would end all at the behest of the Bad Boys, a Detroit Pistons team built around brute force and hard nosed defense. So, just for reference, six years into his NBA career, the player long associated with winning it all costs, the shooting guard many called the greatest of all time, had twenty four playoff wins, twenty nine losses, and never made the finals. The next eight years would be a lot different, as in ninety five playoff wins, thirty seven losses, and six NBA championships formed by two separate three peats. What caused this tectonic shift and outcomes? For one, the bulls Ross had accumulated a crop of more talented players to surround Jordan with this time, but that wasn't enough. The real instigator wasn't a what. It was a who who by the name of Phil Jackson, the man who recognized that Jordan's greatest trait had nothing to do with his scoring ability or how insanely high he could leap. The man who saw the inner workings of what made Jordan's special an unceasing will to win at all costs, no matter the consequences. If I had to name Jordan's career before Phil Jackson took over as head coach, I'd call it Michael Jordan Versus the World, and his career with Phil Jackson at the Helm, I'd call the Chicago Bulls Versus the World. Jackson was named head coach of the Bulls at the start of the nineteen ninety season, which would end with the Detroit Pistons knocking them out of the playoffs for the third consecutive time. As the team geared up for the nineteen ninety one season, Jackson knew he had to do something to get past the Pistons, and that something was implementing the Triangle offense, a change that would require the Bulls star player, the best scorer in league history, to give up some control of the offense. In an exerpt from his book titled Eleven Rings, Phil Jackson spoke about the change, quote, this was not going to be an easy conversation. Basically, I was planning to ask Michael, who had won his third scoring title in a row the previous season, to reduce the number of shots he took so that other members of the team could get more involved in the offense. I knew this would be a challenge for him. Michael was only the second player to win both a scoring title and the league MVP Award in the same year, the first being Kareem Abdul Jabbar in nineteen seventy one. I told him that I was planning to implement the triangle, and as a result, he probably wouldn't be able to win another scoring title. You've got to share the spotlight with your teammates, I said, because if you don't, they won't grow. Okay, I guess I could average thirty two points, he said. That's eight points a quarter. Nobody else is going to do that. Well, when you put it that way, maybe we can win the title, I said, But how about scoring a few more of those points at the end of the game. In general, I tried to give Michael room to figure out how to integrate his personal ambitions with those of the team. Phil knew that winning the scoring title was important to me, Michael says, now, but I wanted to do it in a way that didn't take away from what the team was doing. End quote. There's a lot to take away from that excerpt, including how casually Jordan talks about dropping his scoring average to thirty two points per game, which would still lead the league. The main takeaway isn't something explicitly said in Their Strange though, it's the very idea itself that Phil Jackson believed he could convince Jordan to adapt to the team first triangle offense. One would think the man most linked with a killer mentality to be an immutable, stubborn, selfish player, incapable of sharing the ball more with his teammates to quote help them grow, and Jordan could have ignored Jackson and continued to score at an unfathomable rate. The thing about Jordan, though, is that he wanted to win, wanted it badly enough that he was willing to listen to Phil Jackson, willing to give up the reigns of the offense in the hope that the team would win more. And that's the essence of Jordan. Small slides did end up becoming personal to him. He did want to score more than anyone else, and he did believe in his innate talent, but none of those things could surpass his desire to win, and that's what Phil Jackson recognized too. Jordan fans and haters alike seemed to focus too much on his arrogance or his do it myself mentality, losing sight of his true greatness and letting that blind them. It's the same way people equate Steve Jobs and its tendency to be a bit of a jerk with his genius. His genius was born from his innate skill in understanding what customers want and delivering that to them, no matter how impossible it seemed. It was in spite of his disagreeableness that he became what he was not because of it. When we think of Michael Jordan, we think of the shot, his game winning jump shot that clinched a best of five playoff series against the Cleveland Cavaliers. We ignore that the Bulls lost the next series against the Pistons. We remember Jordan's scoring sixty three points in a loss to the Celtics, and somehow forget that Jordan won his first NBA championship because he chose to trust Phil Jackson's team first vision and chose to pass the ball to John Paxson, who scored ten points in the final four minutes of the first championship Jordan and the Bulls ever won. Minor slightes did become personal with Michael Jordan. There's no doubt about that. His ability to turn that adversity into motivational fuel and elevate his game is an undeniable part of what made him so good. He was also a vicious perfectionist, one who punched fellow teammates, cussed out his co stars, and wanted the ball in his hands for the final shot. I took it personally. Meme Spawn from the Last Dance offers a truthful glimpse into his stunning intensity and competitive nature, but it's just that a glimpse. It doesn't paint the full picture. The meme falsely implies that Jordan's killer mentality, his me versus everyone else's attitude, was what made him so special. Reality is more complicated than that, and above all else, the trait that truly made Jordan one of the greats was his unceasing, unending, unflappable desire to win, no matter what, even if it meant sacrificing His own statistics were personal achievements for that goal. Yes, Jordan wanted the ball in his hands. For the final shot, but he didn't need it, not if passing to someone else gave the bowls a better chance at winning, because more than anything, Jordan wanted to win win when. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Sports Dot MP three, the sports podcast your non sports friends might actually like or at least tolerate. If you enjoyed today's episode, please remember to share it with everyone in your life who might enjoy it. Lastly, make sure to follow at Sports Underscore MP three that's spo r TS Underscore MP three on socials to never miss an episode or update. As a reminder, I'll be back next Thursday with a new episode. Thank you again for listening to this episode of Sports Dot MP three. I'm Will Gatchell and I'll see you next week. 00:22:52 Speaker 2: Peace at about the 00:23:16 Speaker 1: Do