Category: sports

My Futile Fight to Divorce the Atlanta Falcons

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“Are you going to watch the NFL draft tonight?” John asked me.

“Of course,” I said, “and I’ll probably shout, ‘I want a divorce from this Gawdforsaken franchise’ again this year. It’s an annual tradition in my household.” 

Are you strapped into the fandom of a futile franchise? “What do you mean strapped?” The first image we have of being “strapped in” is that of a pilot, heading upward in for a flight into the wild, blue yonder. Now picture a pilot being strapped into a vessel headed downward. That is the futile flight the passengers on board the Atlanta Falcon have experienced lo’ these many years. 

Why do I continue to cheer the Atlanta Falcons on forty-eight years after I randomly chose to cheer them on when I was nothing but a seven-year-old, stupid kid who randomly pointed at them and said, ‘That’s the team I will cheer on.’ 

“You don’t choose your favorite team,” says a sentiment in Korean sport, “your team chooses you.” I get that, if we’re from Foxboro, Santa Clara, Cleveland, or the surrounding areas, it kind of makes sense. We have regional pride, personal history, and social bonds formed by everyone who forced us to cheer on the local team. What if we’re from an area, three to four hours’ drive time from the nearest professional organization, how they choose us? 

I was seven-years-old when I chose the Atlanta Falcons as the team I would cheer on for the rest of my life. I didn’t choose to cheer them on for the rest of my life, but that is what happened. The stadium the Falcons call home is fourteen hours’ drive time from where I live, I didn’t know anyone who cheered them on, and I’ve met very few fellow fans since. My dad didn’t know much about professional football, and he admitted he’d barely even heard of the Falcons. The Falcons also didn’t have any of my favorite college football players on their roster at the time, and they’ve only had a handful of them since. I had little-to-no connection to the Falcons at the time, and I still don’t in all the ways we’ve outlined here.

We All Like Winners

The first thing the uninformed, unaffiliated seven-year-old fan routinely does is cheer on the team their dad does. If they are unable to formulate that connection, they choose to cheer on one of the closest teams they can find. The final determining factor for them is the success of the team. When you’re seven-years-old, your favorite team says a lot about you, and you want people to think you’re a winner. In the 70s, everyone’s favorite team was either the Steelers or the Cowboys, or if you were naughty, you cheered on the Raiders. Those teams were the winners in the late 70s, our formative years, and everyone I knew selected one of those three teams. I met a few Vikings fans, but the general sentiment on them was that they weren’t good enough to win the Super Bowl. I knew one Dolphins fan, but he received some grief for cheering on a franchise whose time had passed. 

I decided to cheer on a team who didn’t have a past, a present, or future. A website called Quick Report lists the Atlanta Falcons as “the fourth worst NFL franchise of all time.” Another outlet called The Top Tens rates the Atlanta Falcons franchise as the 46th worst franchise in professional sports.

My favorite characterization of me is that I chose a team, independent of any influence, as a testament to the strong sense of individuality I obviously exhibited at a very young age. They were mine, all mine, and I didn’t have to share them with anyone, because no one else wanted them. Did I have an enviable streak of individuality at a young age? I did not when it came to books, music, movies, and other entertainment mediums. I liked what the cool kids told me to like, and when they turned on those players in the industry, I turned with them. I was not immune to peer pressure by any means, but I chose to thwart it in this one instance. Does that make sense to you, because it doesn’t to me. 

The only theory I have that makes any sense is color. I liked the pretty colors they wore on their uniforms. The Atlanta Falcons franchise chose to wear Red, white, and black. These were the same colors as my favorite college football team, the team that represents my states, and the university I attended. I’ve only purchased four cars in my life, all of them were either red or white, with black trim. Those colors obviously appeal to me. If you’ve followed the history of the Falcon’s uniform choices, however, you know they’ve switched the color of their uniforms from black and silver to now black, red and silver. I didn’t switch with them or from them. Why?

Philosophical and Emotional Layers

The next logical entry is the “lovable losers” tag that we used to apply to the Chicago Cubs franchise. I submit that the worst business move the Cubs ever made was winning the 2016 World Series. Why, because a large segment of the nation, outside Illinois and the surrounding region, cheered the Cubs on because they were lovable losers. They won the World Series in 1908, and they waited 108 years to win it again. Five generations of Cubs’ fans knew nothing of championship rings, and they loved it. They loved it so much that if we were to talk about their latest losing streak, their foibles in the post-season, the Cubs’ fan might chuckle with us. They knew all about it, and they loved it so much it was almost a crafty marketing gimmick, enhanced by the stories of jinxes, including the Curse of the Billy Goat, the Black Cat Incident, Steve Bartman Incident, and the Bernie Mac Jinx. The Falcons are nearing sixty-years as a franchise, and the franchise has the Eugene Robinson incident and, of course, 28-3. 

If the Atlanta Falcons fan, the WE, can make it past 28-3, what does that say about us? It suggests resilience, loyalty, and a sense that we’re all sharing in the struggle. Unwavering support is a badge of honor. If you’re a superfan, it becomes a part of who you are. It’s not just a preference, or it no longer is, it’s a reflection of your values, memories, and experiences. I becomes we, they becomes us, and those guys become our fellas fighting in the fields for glory. 

“I think we’re going to draft an Edge rusher this year,” we say, “because that’s been our greatest need for almost a decade.” Again, I know very very few Falcons’ fans in my locale, about fourteen-hours’ drive time from my home, so when I say, “we” and “us,” I’m not sharing a perspective with anyone I know, except the far-flung writers on a Falcons message board.

When a team like the Falcons become us/we, the theys on message boards drop “28-3!” on us in a snarky, smug way that attempts to force us to probe the tapestry of our being. The truly sad thing is that it took me a while to realize that the personal pain I felt, after that infamous choke job, was actually and factually absurd. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t actually on the field, missing a crucial block, throwing a crucial interception, snapping the ball with too much time on the clock, and electing to pass rather than run. I didn’t personally do any of that, I see that now, but I didn’t see that their (not our in this particular case) loss was not a reflection on my character. I actually had nothing to do with that loss. If it’s hard for you to grasp the idea that a rational, logical person couldn’t easily separate himself with the failure of images of football players on TV, you’ve never been, or known, a superfan.    

As difficult as it can be for a superfan to disentangle himself from the emotional entanglements that emphasize his existence, I am making strides. I now write things like this, “I realize I know little-to-nothing about the day-to-day decisions on personnel and any of the intricacies involved in their decision-making process. I’m not there for the day-to-day, I don’t see these players in practice, and I don’t know them personally.” I wrote on “our” Atlanta Falcon’s bulletin board, “but I think the decision they made was a mistake.” In that disclaimer, I effectively gained some psychological distance from the ‘us, we, and our’ lexicon we superfans usually use. 

I dropped that disclaimer on the billboard page many times, because I was trying to objectively say that I know my opinion is not only relatively and comparatively uninformed, and I know my opinion doesn’t matter, but I have to write it somewhere. No one ever replied to any of my posts. My guess is that this disclaimer might have been a buzz kill, because we all kind of know we don’t know squat, compared to the owner, the GM, the coach, and all of those in the hierarchy responsible for personnel decisions, but no one admits it. Such a disclaimer might also “pop” the delusion that we all know what we’re talking about, because we read it, watched it, and saw it in the games, so we know. Their ambivalence to my posts might also have something to do with the idea that it’s so obvious that we don’t know what we’re talking about that it really doesn’t need to be said. 

Here is another element to the post 28-3 Falcons’ loyalty, if we’re going to vicariously partake in whatever glory they achieve in victory, we must also commiserate with them in pain. Wrong, watching football on TV is supposed to be something we do to pass the time, and it should provide entertainment to our lives, nothing more and nothing less. Wrong, it’s not entertaining, it’s football. It’s not life and death, and some part of me knows that, but it’s often the difference between a smile on the face for the rest of the week, and a “We suck!” Mr. Grumpy Face week. 

“I look forward to [the offseason],” a man named Ryan Ray says in the GQ article cited aove, written by Tom Lamont. “The six to eight weeks when I don’t have to focus on anything to do with this football club. I long for it.” Ray also said, “Sometimes I wish I could just sit there without any bias [while watching a game], without any interest—but it’s not me. I’m tribal.”

I’ve been there Ryan Ray, and I feel you. I’ve watched numerous football games involving other teams, and I know how entertaining this game can be, when I have no rooting interest. I wish, like Ray, I could have fun watching a Falcons’ game and appreciate them from a distance. I wish I could sit back and appreciate the athletic exploits of Falcons’ players the way normal folks do, but when Falcons’ players succeed it’s nothing more than a relief that they didn’t fail yet again. I marvel at other players play at peak performance where the difference between winning and losing can be mere inches, or the subtle juke the runner puts on a defender that only a true fan of the sport can appreciate. When it’s all on the line, and my bias is in full force, I only experience abject failure, misery, and roughly three hours of what it must feel like to have clinical depression.

“If they make you so miserable, why don’t you just switch teams?” the non-sports fans might ask from Mount Simpleton. My dad asked me this question referencing the video games that made me scream like a lunatic. “If they make you this miserable, why don’t you just shut it off?” We laugh so hard at his simple-minded question that we didn’t even bother answering him. He didn’t get it. ‘You can’t just shut a game off, because you lost,’ was probably what we should’ve said. ‘That’s the whole reason we keep playing, to eventually and finally beat it. If you’re a gamer, you know this mindset without knowing that beating a game easily and often is actually kind of boring. If you can find a game that is so hard IT CHEATS! that’s the game you will play, to figure out, forever. We don’t quit working after we make our first million, that’s just the start, we don’t dump a lover when they start acting obnoxious, because their drama kind of, sort of makes them more dramatic, traumatic, and interesting in a way that’s tough to describe, and we don’t stop cheering for a professional sports team just because they’re 114 games under .500, and 10-14 in the playoffs without a ring. That’s the very reason to continue to cheer them on for life, because it says something about our character that we stay loyal to them no matter what. “NO MATTER WHAT happens!” Even if it means upping our Tricyclic Antidepressants (TCAs) and Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs) on those three special Sunday hours. It’s all worth it. “No, it’s not!” It is to me, is what I’m telling you. Wait, what we’re talking about again? Oh right, shut up!  

We’re passionate “prisoners [who are so] accustomed to our jails that we refuse means of escape,” Lamont writes, “Logic is not meant to be a part of the true fan’s equipment.” 

If we did our research, and we do, every year, we find that some teams just do it better. That’s rough, tough, and difficult to accept, so we think, “They CHEAT!” They don’t, but it’s easier to say that “and I can back it up!” than it is to sit through the incredibly long and boring NFL Draft and know that some teams obviously have better scouting staff members, General Managers, coaches, and all of the others in their hierarchy who help select the best player for their team. It’s easier to suggest something nefarious is going on than to admit that the franchises in Kansas City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco are going to make “the perfect” decision for their team for the next four-to-five years.

“Why can’t we find those guys?” we shout at the screen every year. We’ve even gone so far as to hire those who used to make those draft picks for their other franchises, and they somehow lose that magic touch when they go to work for us? How does that happen for 58 years? 

“On paper,” Lamont writes, “Intense fandom is absurd.”

If the Atlanta Falcons were a company that had a fifty-eight-year record of making poor decisions, I would’ve sold stock in their company so long ago I wouldn’t even remember owning it. If it were a TV show, movie franchise, or band that put out an inferior product year after year, we would’ve stopped enduring their stench of failure long ago. If our child continued to make such poor decisions, we’d have a “Come to Jesus” sit down moment with them. If it were a spouse, we might divorce them. Why don’t we seek a divorce from our team?

Lamont, quotes a therapist, saying, “People often seek me out because they are feeling stuck in a painful emotional pattern that just won’t let go.” She was probably speaking more generally, but we could easily attribute that quote to our super fandom. The therapist also said when she heard of some suffering from a mean case of super fandom, it reminded her of the mindset of those in a cult.  

She described a commonly reported reason that people give for staying in cults: the sunk cost fallacy. “People can’t leave because they’ve spent so much time and money and energy,” she explained. I read this, and I reread it, and it tells me that some of our deepest affiliations aren’t calculated but emerge from the fabric of our lives.

She later regretted likening it to extraction from a cult. “The situation,” she said, “had more in common with addiction, the high highs, the low lows, the swearing-offs, the shame-inducing returns to the cookie jar.”

“There is a fascinating page on NamuWiki, the Korean-language Wikipedia, that outlines the philosophical case against abandoning one’s team,” Lamont writes. “The act is known in Korea as 팀 세탁—team laundry—and it is understood to involve a paradox. You care enough [that] you want to put an end to your suffering, [but you also] care enough [that] you can’t.”

Some of us grow wiser as we age, and we learn when, where, why, and how to expend our resources. When it comes to sports, I’ve learned, and I’m still learning, with massive amounts of failure in this regard, how to not care so much. Wisdom has taught me that it’s just better for my mental well-being to if not “turn it off” as my dad might suggest, but to lower the volume on all my caring. The Salvation Army suggests that “caring is sharing”, and it’s true in most cases, but caring can be scary at times too. It should be fun to watch “my” guys play football, but it’s not. I do not enjoy it. So, I tape the game on the DVR, and I go outside and play catch with the boy. Then, I check the score of the game on one of my devices. If I find that we won the game that day, I watch the game and vicariously partake in the joy of victory. If they lose, I delete the entry on my DVR. Seeing the final numbers (the score) on a screen, gives me even more distance from the foolish notion I have that some of this final score if “my fault”. It’s also so much less painful than watching their total destruction, or long, slow destruction occur in real-time. If I were part of self-help Falcon fan group session, I would suggest all participants engage in this behavior for better mental-health.   

Some of our more obnoxious group members might suggest for even better mental-health, we should all consider a messy, complicated divorce from the “fourth worst NFL franchise of all time” and “the 46th worst franchise in professional sports”. If some of them could do it, I might applaud them, because I wouldn’t be able to do it. I will continue to cling to the handrail of this slowly sinking ship, in this tragic movie of my demise, where everyone in the audience is screaming, “Just jump off!” I’ve spent so much time, energy, and misspent passion on this inept franchise that even if you were to offer me a life raft, I might say, “Eh, I think I’m doing just fine right here.”

This might come as a shock to most superfine, but it doesn’t really matter what team we choose to cheer on. When fair weather fans tell me why they switch teams with regularity, they basically say, “I choose to cheer on winners, because I’m a winner.” I could say, ‘I’d like to see the science behind that,’ but I know it’s such a ridiculous statement that it’s not even worth challenging. Yet, is saying, ‘I choose to stick by my team no matter what happens, because it’s a testament to my character,’ just as ridiculous? Yes, it is. It makes no sense that I could never follow through on a complete divorce either, even though the temporary separations I’ve achieved over the years have proven great for my mental health. It’s illogical, absurd, and whatever adjectives we apply to superfans, but it is a part of our personal constitution that we stay loyal no matter what happens, and we think less of those who don’t. 

Evel Knievel in The Man who Sold the World

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Evel Knievel was so cool that he could wear a cape, and no one would question why a grow man was wearing a cape. He was so cool that it just seemed right on him. There was a time when Evel Knievel ruled the world, ok maybe not the world, but he definitely ruled the United States for what some say was about nine years, between the late 60s to mid-70s. He had his own toys, his likeness was on lunch boxes, T-shirts, and I even saw an Evel Knievel pinball machine one time in an arcade. I couldn’t play the pinball machine, of course, because the wait time was far too long for me, but it was fun to watch it. We all had our favorite comic book heroes, athletes, and other assorted entertainers, but there was only one “real” man who could wear a cape in public without anyone asking, “What the hell is going on here?”

Evel Knievel could jump anything and everything we could dream up and never fail. All right, he failed … a lot, but we didn’t care about all that back then. We wanted to see him do what he did “better than anyone else ever has or ever will”, and we pretended to be him when riding our bikes. Robert Craig Knievel probably wouldn’t have listed this in the greatest of achievements in his life, but it was huge in our world. The list of characters we pretended to be was about as exclusive as lists can be. We bestowed this honor on The Six-Million Dollar Man, members of the rock group KISS, and various other mythological creatures we call superheroes, but Evel was a superhero to us. 

Thus, it would’ve stunned us to learn that when the history of motorcycle stuntmen was eventually written, Evel Knievel wasn’t even the best motorcycle stuntman in his own family. His son Robbie Knievel proved smarter, more technical, and more prolific than his celebrated father. (Evel committed to 75 ramp-to-ramp jumps while his son engaged in 340, nearly five times more than his beloved father.) Robbie, it could be argued, even created a better name Kaptain Knievel. How cool is that? The name Kaptain Knievel rolls off the tongue with such ease that I’m surprised Andrew Wood didn’t write a Kaptain Knievel song for his band Mother Love Bone. Kaptain Knievel could’ve and probably should’ve been more famous than his father, Evel Knievel, so why wasn’t he?  

Timing: Evel Caught Lightning in a Bottle

I was not a viable lifeform when Elvis rocked our world, and I was not here for Beatlemania, but I saw, firsthand, the hysteria that was Evel Knievel. The guy hit the scene like a comet in the 70s, a red-white-and-blue blur of bravado that turned him into a myth before I even learned how to tie my own shoes. When my friends and I were old enough to hero-worship, we had Evel’s iconic imagery all over our world, from posters on our wall, lunchboxes we took to school, and T-Shirts on our torso. Evel just owned a once-in-a-lifetime sweet spot in time that no one, not even his own son, could duplicate, no matter how much higher or farther he flew. Before he died, this son, Robbie Knievel, Kaptain Knievel, ended up not only continuing the Knievel legacy, he topped it by all measures, but he could never match the fever-pitch frenzy, and the hysteria, that surrounded Evel Knievel. No one could. It was a very special window in time, and unlike some icons who shied away from the spotlight with something called humility, Evel reveled in his moment in the sun.  

It was not mandatory that every kid in this era have an Evel action-figure, but those who didn’t received that “You don’t know what you’re missing” look, even from the nice kids. Mr. Rogers, from Mister Rogers Neighborhood, would never allow his network to commodify his product in this manner, because he didn’t want kids who couldn’t afford those products to feel ostracized. Evel had no such concerns, as his spangled merch flooded every store in the 70s.

I had three different Evel Knievel action-figures–same figure, different outfits—I didn’t care. I had to have them all. Then, we found out that the Evel Empire produced a windup, energizer accessory. If you were a kid during this era, you probably still owe your parents an apology for all the whining and badgering you did as Christmas day approached, because you were probably as awful to them as I was to mine. When Santa Claus ended up fulfilling my only wish, I wound ‘er up and let ‘er go, and when I was done, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t experience a level of euphoria equal to, or greater than that moment if I lived to be 100-years-old. Decades later, I tried passing those feelings of euphoria onto my nephew with an exact replica of this Evel figure and its windup energizer accessory, he broke it within a week. Weeks after that Christmas, I found this toy I once cherished on the top shelf of toys of his closet to gather dust with the toys he would never play with again. The idea that my nephew had no regard for this toy stunned me. I knew he never heard of Evel Knievel, but I thought it was a standalone, great toy. I was wrong. The euphoria I experienced playing with this toy, at his age, was obviously based on the mythology, iconography, and the hype and hysteria of all things Evel in the 70s.  

The Media: Evel Owned the Airwaves

There was a time when one individual could rule the airwaves, and Evel Knievel did. It was so far back that it almost seems quaint now before cable, YouTube, VCRs, DVRs, and the internet or streaming services. There were only three channels, and they didn’t repeat broadcasts, or if they did, we usually had to wait months for the rerun. If we missed one of his appearances, pre-jump interviews, and the events themselves, we were just out. “You missed it?” our friends asked. “How could you just miss it? I was counting the days till it happened.”

“I forgot. I was out playing or something, and I just, just forgot,” I said to my never-ending shame. It was one of those situations where our friends could recount what happened for us, but it wasn’t the same, and we had this idea that this might mark us for the rest of our lives. 

Robbie, bless him, hit his stride when cable and the internet fractured the game. Sure, he got some TV love—his Grand Canyon leap was aired live after all—but Evel’s regular-network spectacles had a bigger and rarer feel that had that must-see-TV feel, long before the networks coined the phrase. Robbie could share his feats online, but that magic of “counting the days till it happened” were long gone.

Evel Knievel Was Larger Than Life

Back before the internet and 24-hour news shows, we didn’t know everything, all of the time. We didn’t know the negatives about our heroes. We had our naysayers of course, but we could dismiss their ideas as speculative, because they didn’t really know what they were talking about either. We couldn’t pull up a device and search for all nuggets on Evel Knievel to find everything we wanted to know about him. If I ran into him at the supermarket, I wouldn’t have known it was him, because I didn’t even know what he looked like. I figured he probably looked as good as Superman with Batman’s aura of cool. We filled in the blanks of what we didn’t know with what we wanted to think, and we decided to make him god-like. Kaptain Robbie probably ended up pulling off more dangerous stunts, and if we gauged them by qualitative and quantifiable measures, he was probably the better of the two motorcycle daredevils, but Evel was there first. He also pioneered the iconic image of guts and glory in a way that led to a cultural impact that penetrated the zeitgeist in a way no one, not even his son, could.   

Evel was also a Mess

I was a kid during Evel Knievel’s prime, so I didn’t know all the ins and outs of what Evel did, and I was too young to analyze why he had such historical allure. He wasn’t really human to me. He was an action-figure to me, a symbol for everything I wanted to be, but he was no more real or unreal than Batman—an action figure, literally and figuratively. Yet, this obviously wasn’t reason he was so famous among adults. Why did they love him to the point that every source of media had to have some attachment to him in some way if they hoped to compete in the era’s landscape? He crashed. A lot. “You know what I was really good at,” Evel told his cousin, and U.S. Congressman, Pat Williams. “You know what I was bad at was the landing. It was the bad landings. That’s what brought the crowds out. Nobody wants to see me die, but they don’t want to miss it when I do.”

As evidence of that, Evel Knievel’s most iconic video is that of his failed jump at Caesar’s Palace. After he narrowly missed hitting the landing ramp square, he bounced up and over his bike. When he hit his head, he appeared to narrowly avoid life-altering impact, but when his lower back and hindquarters slammed into the ground, the audience at-home could almost feel the hollow thud that must’ve screamed in Evel’s ears. When he rolled about four times, it didn’t look real. He looked like a ragdoll or one of those crash test dummies that we watch react to impact with an emotional distance, because they’re not alive. Anyone who has ever crashed on a bike, in a car, or on a bigwheel knows some small, not even worth discussing level of comparable pain that teaches us the golden rule of crashing: If you’re going to crash, try your best to avoid landing on concrete, because it hurts like the dickens. 

Why did adults of this era watch? Why do non-fans watch NASCAR, hockey, and why do we slowdown for a wreck on the interstate. Adults presumably turned up at the shows and tuned into the broadcasts that carried these performances, because they wanted to be there if someone was going to die that day. 

Whereas the son, Kaptain Knievel, achieved twenty different records, Evel racked up twenty major crashes, and his own Guinness Book of World Records’ record 433 broken bones. 433! Yes, Biology enthusiasts, we only have 206 bones in our body, and no he didn’t have more than double the number of bones the rest of us have. If you’re going to attempt to break Evel’s current record, you’re probably going to have to break the same bones multiple times. Kaptain Knievel decided he didn’t want to go the course of his father, so he chose a Honda CR500, a much lighter bike than Evel’s Harley-Davidson XR-750, and Kaptain Robbie analyzed his jumps and made sure he would succeed. He did succeed far more often than his famous father, but the adult audience probably grew so accustomed to his success that they kind of got used to it in a way that bored them a little.

“I’m not going to watch,” my aunt said before one of the airings of Evel’s jumps, “because I’m not going to contribute to that man’s desire to kill himself, because he will die. You know that don’t you? That fool is going to get himself killed.” 

My aunt was right, of course, as Evel wasn’t very good at what he did. Kaptain Knievel had some crashes too, but they paled in comparison to the severity of Evel’s. When Evel crashed, we felt bad for him, we thought of his family and other loved ones, and some of us even cried a little. We did it, because we cared, and we enjoyed caring, because we didn’t want to see this beloved man get hurt again. Robbie never built that reservoir of love and concern, because he rarely failed, and when he did, he didn’t get hurt as severely, and we viewed him as nothing more than a guy who used a motorcycle to jump over stuff. 

The most memorable jump Evel Knievel performed, for me, was the January 31, 1977 jump at the Chicago International Ampitheatre. This scheduled event suggested that Evel was going to jump over a number of sharks, SHARKS! This event just happened to coincide with the aftermath of the first true summer blockbuster, Jaws. Jaws was a movie so horrific and scary that no one I knew was allowed to see it, but as you can guess that verboten nature led us to talk about it endlessly. We all knew someone who knew someone who saw it, and we recounted for our friends what actually happened in that movie. Thus, when we learned that our superhero was going to test the meddle of the world’s most fearsome maneater, we kind of worried: 

“What if he misses?” we asked one another, in the midst of the hysteria. “What if a shark jumps out of the water, as he’s flying overhead? They do that. No seriously, I’ve heard that they do that.” None of us knew that sharks are actually relatively cautious predators, and the reason their predatory behavior involves them circling unknown prey is that they’re trying to determine if they’re going to get hurt in the process. They know that even a small, relatively innocuous injury can damage their predatory skills and could lead to their premature death. If Evel splashed into the tank, in other words, the sharks that weren’t hit on impact, probably would’ve swam as far away from the point of impact as possible. We didn’t know any of that. We thought they were the impulsive killing machines depicted in Jaws. I later learned Evel’s jump ended in disaster during a rehearsal, and he retired from major jumps shortly afterward, but none of that mattered to me as I was all hyped up on everything Evel. 

We loved to ride bikes in the wayback when kids did things outside, and every kid I knew pretended to be Evel Knievel for just a moment when we took rocks and put plywood on them and “jumped” from one board to another. When we did this often enough, even in our Evel Knievel mindsets, it could get a little boring after a while. To try to match the intensity of our hero, we did everything we could to make our jump more dangerous. We increased the angle of the board, had our friends lay between the two boards, and any and every stupid thing we could think up to make it a little more dangerous. We wanted someone, somewhere to say, “You are crazy!” No one ever said that in an advisory manner, in my memory, it was always said with a tinge of excitement, as in ‘He’s crazy, but I think he’s going to do it.’ I still remember the time I broke Steve’s record on the block for longest jump, but even though it ended with a me-bike-me-bike roll up crash, I still beat it. Was it worth it, if you asked short-term me, I probably would’ve said no, as there was a lot of memorable pain, but when the theys on the block were still talking about it, months later, it felt worth it. They talked about the painful crash of course, and they laughed when they did, but they always mentioned that it set the record for the block.

We unwittingly answered the question why Evel Knievel was more popular and still is more famous than his son Robbie. Evel was either so stubborn, or so crazy, that he didn’t want to do things the way they should’ve been done. He performed with a “my way or the highway” that usually led to him waking up in a hospital. Evel Knievel did succeed on occasion, and we shouldn’t forget that, but when he did, it was almost a relief to see that he didn’t get hurt in the process. Robbie Knievel was so good at what he did, presumably learning from his father’s mistakes, that when he completed a jump, it eventually became less of a daredevil feat and more of a guy jumping over stuff with a motorized vehicle. There was no drama to it, and it lacked the “Is he going to die today?” had-to-be-there-if-he-did status that his father’s jumps did.     

Was Michael Jordan the GOAT?

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“If you think Michael Jordan is the greatest NBA player of all time, by far, you’re probably between the ages of 40-60,” blared one reddit commenter.  

Some call it recency bias, but seeing as how Jordan took his Bulls’ jersey off for the final time 25 years ago, we could say that the recency bias exists in the pro-Kobe, pro-LeBron arguments. I’d call the pro-Jordan argument a generational bias. The generational bias suggests that everything that happened before and after my prime is not as great as it was during this relative window. With all these biases rolling around in everyone’s, it’s almost impossible to arrive at a final objective answer.

Some might also argue that the most instrumental bias in such arguments is the emotional bias. Those of the 40-60 demographic cheered harder for and against Jordan than later generations did Kobe and LeBron. That’s an almost impossible argument to debate, of course, as it’s all relative, but we do have statistics to argue and counter. That’s still impossible to argue, as Mark Twain once said, “There’s lies, damned lies and statistics.” It’s true, both teams can argue their statistics in the Jordan v LeBron argument, but there are stats and there are advanced metrics. Before we get into that argument, however, we must discount longevity, games started and played, and minutes, as LeBron entered the NBA straight out of high school, and Jordan played three years in college. Longevity and games played are valuable stats in our determination, but LeBron never retired, and Jordan did three times. LeBron obviously wins all of these categories.  

The advanced stats dig deep into actual games played, and they include value over replacement statistics, player efficiency rating, and fifteen other advanced statistics of the players’ respective careers that favor Michael Jordan 9-6, by category, in the regular season and LeBron James wins these metrics 9-8 in the postseason metrics. LeBron beats Jordan by a substantial number in win share, or the total number of wins contributed by a player, in both regular season and playoffs, which is surprising, but Jordan barely beats him in a majority of the regular season categories. It’s also surprising to see that the deep metrics in the postseason favor LeBron, as I would’ve guessed that would’ve been flipped. Big Game Mike, to my mind, took his game up to stratospheric, untouchable levels in the postseason. LeBron was better. If postseason is far more important than regular season stats, and an overwhelming number of people agree this is the case, LeBron actually has a slight advantage in most cases against Jordan.

Another publication used a more comprehensive approach, regular season and postseason combined, with advanced stats compiled by various publication. Their categorical verdict: dead even.

In the Clutch

Whenever Kobe or LeBron missed, and misses, a clutch playoff shot, some of us hit that “He’s not Jordan!” button. We don’t even consider that a bias at this point. It happened. We don’t remember Jordan ever missing a clutch playoff shot, but we do remember the many misses by Kobe and LeBron. The Bleacher Report developed a very simple formula for a definition of clutch shots in the playoffs. “Playoff games only (no regular season), go ahead or game-tying shot attempts (free throws, turnovers, and the like were ignored, [and the shot attempt had to occur in the]) final 24 seconds or he fourth quarter or overtime.” Within the constraints of this definition of playoff clutch shots, Jordan, they found, was 9-18 in clutch, playoff attempts, for “an astounding” 50% clip. LeBron is 7-16 for a 43.8% rate. (Not Jordan, but it was a lot closer than some of us remember.) Kobe was 7-25 for a 28% (or 5-17 for a 29.4% in the chart they provided).     

Player Makes Attempts FG%
Michael Jordan 9 18 50
LeBron James 7 16 43.8
Kevin Durant 5 12 41.7
Dirk Nowitzki 5 12 41.7
Kobe Bryant 5 17 29.4

Microsoft’s Co-Pilot program lists the following clutch field goal percentages for NBA greats in the playoffs. Jordan 45%, Kobe 41%, Bird 40%, Lillard 42%, Wade 42%, and Horry, LeBron, Magic were all at 40%. So, although, Jordan leads the pack, it’s not by as much as the 40-60 aged demographic remembers. 

One contrarian argument I read online, states that the disparity between the elite talent and average player the 90s and the 2020s, favors the 2020s. They argue that the worst teams of the 90s were far worse than the worst teams of the 2020s. They argue that “There’s no question that the average player is more skilled today than in the 90’s.” They also write that The Chicago Bulls were able to achieve total dominance of the regular season thanks to expansion and a difference in defense rules. Another decent argument I’ve heard is that no one in the NBA, prior to Mike, had the marketing and promotion packages that he would receive.

In terms of marketing alone, I won’t even hear arguments about Bill Russell, Wilt, Kareem, or Dr. J. The only NBA marketing argument that comes close to that which Jordan received was Bird v Magic. If Bird v Magic saved the NBA, on a national level, however, Michael Jordan took it to the worldwide stage. Larry Bird was allergic to the press, and he only gave interviews begrudgingly, so that leaves the media-friendly smile and laughter of Magic Johnson. He was a hero to many, but his media attention paled in comparison to the worldwide, superstar treatment afforded Jordan. Kobe and LeBron later had a taste of it, of course, as they were the best players of their era, but they could never escape the cloud of “the chosen one”. The implicit statement is that Kobe and LeBron may have been as good, or better, than Jordan, but the 40-60 demo wouldn’t allow anyone to flirt with that notion. As a person who doesn’t follow the intricacies of the league, I must concede to the argument that part of Jordan’s impenetrable image as the GOAT revolves around how much the media adored him. The only marketing push that could come close to Michael Jordan was that of the “King of pop” Michael Jackson.

The Competition

To get to the core of this particular argument, we must dismiss the regular season records and the stats they achieved against average players. Even playoff teams have average, role players in every lineup, but if we were to stack the elite teams of each era against each other, let’s go seven deep on the various rosters, how would the late-80s, 90s Bulls, Pistons, Knicks, Jazz, Rockets, Sonics, do against the 2000s Spurs, the Shaq, Kobe Lakers, or the 2010s Warriors, Heat, Celtics and Lakers?

If we could somehow move the Jordans’ Bulls forward a decade or three, how do they fare against the elite teams of latter decades? First question, whose rules do they play under? Does Jordan operate better or worse in the wide-open rules of latter decades, or did the Warriors play an almost indefensible offense at their peak? On the flips side, if we could move the elite modern teams back, under the rules of yesteryear and Detroit’s “Jordan Rules” become “Kobe Rules” or “LeBron Rules”, do they overcome them in the manner Jordan eventually did? Would Tim Duncan, Ginobili, and Parker survive against Pat Riley’s brutal lane enforcement rules carried out by Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason and Xavier McDaniels? Do Jordan and the Bulls 4-2 Shaq and Kobe in championship series? If Jordan and LeBron play in the same era, does Jordan kill LeBron’s legacy the way he did so many others? As with just about every sport, it’s almost impossible to compare eras. The game changes, evolves, and adapts with rule changes. The brutal nature of the game in which no one was allowed a layup, became a wide-open, almost 3-point dependent game.

Focusing on the elite level alone, one reddit writer submits that: “There’s no evidence to support [the idea] that the [elite] players from the 90s are any better or worse than the [elite] players of today. In 632 games, Jordan never lost three games in a row, went 27-1 in playoff series [during that span], won three consecutive championships twice, 10 scoring titles, nine 1st-team all-defense awards. Led the league in steals 3 times, was the first player to ever record 200 steals and 100 blocks in one season and he did it twice [This stat, some would argue is timeless]. Won 14 MVPs (6 Finals, 5 regular seasons, 3 All Star game) plus 2 dunk contest championships. [He] was outscored once in 37 playoff series (in 1985 Terry Cummings outscored MJ by 1 point in the first-round series, 118-117), and [he] is 1st all-time in the number of times a player averaged 40 or more points in a playoff series. He did it 5 times and there’s a 4-way tie for 2nd place who have all done it [once]. [Jordan] also has outscored 982 out of 983 total opponents in career head2head match ups. (Alan Iverson being the only player ever by avg 27.1ppg in 7 games vs MJ who avg 24.4ppg). And this was all in 12 full regular seasons and 13 playoff appearances (15 active seasons). It’s basketballs greatest resume by a mile and those who weren’t there to see it do not want to believe it so, that’s why the 90s era gets no respect.”

The reddit user ends with a compelling argument. Most of the argument centers on the idea that we, the 40-60 demo, suffer from a number of biases, but the same could be said of those in the generation where Michael Jordan officially became a grandfather. If all you know of Michael Jordan are the YouTube videos, the “If I could be like Mike” commercials, the idea that Jordan was the GOAT might sound like “The Three Stooges were the greatest comedians of all time” or “The Andy Griffith Show was a greater sitcom than Seinfeld” arguments did to us. Unlike Curly or Barney Fife, most of Jordan’s exploits occurred between the highlights, on nights when it seemed like he couldn’t seem to miss midrange shots that only counted for two points. These weren’t the dramatic shots that we see on YouTube, but they don’t show what those in the 40-60 demo know.

The 90s Knicks

The best team the Bulls beat during this era would have to be the New York Knicks. Those Knicks 90s rosters may have been the best assemblage of NBA talent to never win an NBA Championship Ring. During Patrick Ewing’s run with the Knicks, they had John Starks, Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason, Xavier McDaniel, Greg Anthony, Gerald Wilkins, Derek Harper, Doc Rivers, Charles Smith, Mo Cheeks, Bill Cartwright, Bernard King, Hubert Davis, and the later rosters included Larry Johnson, Allan Houston, Marcus Camby, Anthony Bowie, and Latrell Sprewell, and they never won a ring.  

Jordan and the Knicks faced each other five times, in this era of their respective primes, and Jordan and the Bulls went 5-0 in those matchups. If the reader doesn’t consider that record eye-popping, go read Blood in the Garden to get a grasp on how talented those Knicks’ teams were.

Jordan retired (the first time) to play baseball? and Ewing and the Knicks lost to Hakeem Olajuwon’s Rockets then Reggie Miller’s Pacers. Jordan retires again, and the Knicks lose to Tim Duncan, David Robinson, and the Spurs. I still cannot believe Patrick Ewing, and his Knicks’ teams never won a ring.   

The Late 80’s Early 90’s Pistons

The late 80s/early 90s Pistons’ run was not near as lengthy as the Knicks’, but they packed a whole lot of winning in that shorter time frame. Some rightly blame the talent around Jordan, but the Pistons beat Jordan and the Bulls in three straight playoff series from 1987-1990.

We can all admit to some type of bias in these never-ending arguments, but those of us in the 40-60 demographic will never be able to get passed “The Run”. When Jordan and the Bulls finally found a way to beat the Pistons, no team could stop them. They won six championships in a row (not counting the retirement years), and no one, outside the 60s Celtics, have been able to match such a run. Those of us in this demo will listen to arguments about stats and advanced metrics that suggest the argument between LeBron and Michael is a lot closer that we thought, and we might even entertain the idea that on many of those scales, especially in the postseason, LeBron was statistically better, but LeBron was never able to amass anything equivalent to “The Run” of six championships in a row (not counting retirement).   

If Michael Jordan never existed, how many rings would Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Clyde Drexler, and Malone and Stockton have? How many more would Magic, Bird, and Isiah have? How many different legacies would have been cemented with a ring, if he never existed? There’s a reason they call Michael Jordan the legacy killer.

The counter argument might be, that if Michael Jordan had to compete against “The virtually unstoppable” David Robinson, Tim Duncan combo, the Kobe, Shaq combo, the LeBron, Kyrie combo, or Steph Curry and the Warriors ability to shoot the ball from outside the arena, he might not have had such an almost unprecedented run. Before we strip Jordan of his crown, however, we do need to go back those names of elite, hall of fame names from the era’s elite teams of its own “virtually unstoppable” combos and elite talent that Jordan and the Bulls defeated. Our conclusion matches that of the Reddit use who claimed: “There’s no evidence to support [the idea] that the [elite] players from the 90s are any better or worse than the [elite] players of today.”  

Of all the biases involved in these arguments, the toughest to overcome is the emotional one. We can all argue our generational biases, as we all deem the best players of “our” era as the best to ever play the game. Others, from other eras, might argue that Bill Russell, Wilt, Dr. J, Pistol Pete, Oscar Robertson, Kareem, Magic and Bird, Isiah, Tim Duncan, Kobe, LeBron, Steph Curry, and Nikola Jokic were/are better, but these arguments focus on tangible elements of the game. No NBA player I’ve witnessed, in my life (and I admit to many biases to arrive at this conclusion), has combined elite talent with elite levels of doing anything and everything he had to to win better than Michael Jordan. His own teammates talk about how vicious and downright mean he could be to them during practice. He played psychological games with them, his opponents, and himself in order to gain some kind of edge for that series, or that night, for one win in a series. On some level, we have to throw the idea of biases and metrics out the window and put ourselves in Michael Jordan’s shoes. He had all the money in the world, he couldn’t leave his hotel room in most countries around the world, because of his fame, and he had every creature comfort a human being could dream up, but when one of his teams needed a win, he almost always came through in the final six years of his career as a Bull (the one series loss to the Shaq, Penny Hardaway-led Magic being the sole exception). Five of the six championships, during his much talked about run, were 4-2, six game wins. Each of them required him to dig deep to help his team find some way to overcome his opponent, and I’ve never seen another player will his team to win as often, or with as much consistency, as the greatest basketball player who ever lived, Michael Jordan.