Jordan’s Skyline Story 10/16/2009

Card Vitals:

Michael Jordan

1991-92 SkyBox, “SkyMaster,” # 253

I was in love with this card from the moment I saw it. It was just so Jordan, so very much how he played, above the skyline and player crowd; above the fray of mortal, earth-bound men. It was the perfect synchronization of the shared early-Jordan experience and the understanding he had with his fans: He was to be a Concorde or a classic fighter jet, cutting through the sky, and in return, his fans would champion him, even as he was struggling to find his way to a championship. (Pardon the corny pun.) What’s important is that the photograph isn’t even of him stuffing a shot down the cup after a whirl of zig-zags, and his barreling down the lane. And I actually believe I recognize the play in this photograph: it was an in-bounds save, I think. I can even see the frame’s following sequences: of his giant hand actually stopping the ball’s rotation mid-flight, with his legs churning for a second, for him to extract just a couple more milliseconds of hang-time, then spot a receiver and deliver the subsequent pass.

This is the effect of watching so many games, checking the press clippings the next day from all the various newspapers and then later, catching either the W.G.N. highlights packages on the Chicagoland 10 p.m. broadcast, which aired at 8 p.m. for me since I lived in California, watching Sports Center and reading the Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News or Sport magazine’s of the month. When one gets into a pattern of that kind of barrage of information, they start to see that the same shots from the same people tend to be sourced, whether by N.B.A. Entertainment — who would use full-video of the same play — and/or a recycled still image from one of those print outlets.

And so many times for me, the images became recognizable, and were tracked to individual games. Those images still stay with me now, from video of his hanging turnaround fall-aways with him landing out-of-bounds after being raked across the arms — and this is far before he became known for the fall-away that became his pièce de résistance late-game weapon — to just the less-memorable lay- ins. These still images always seem to match to the video of the moment in the mind’s eye and or the corollary: the video assisting me to help remember the image and the memory attached to it. Media exposure reinforcement. (My term.)

I also just happen to love this card’s front image, because it was Jordan in the white home jersey, which was still somewhat rare in his cards from the early ’90s. The traditional Bulls’ red road uniform is how most remember Jordan personally, and it has been transferred to most of his hoops media fare. While I watched many a Bulls’ game either on the-then enormously packed-to-the-gills C.B.S., N.B.C., T.N.T. and T.B.S. N.B.A. schedule, it seemed that the real totemic Bulls’ fan cathode ray tube experience was W.G.N.’s home games with that raucous Chicago Stadium crowd chanting and gasping, yelling “threeeee!” as Jordan or Pippen drove and kicked to Hodges, Armstrong or Paxson in the corners or at the top of the key, and Bulls color man, Johnny Kerr, being such an unabashed “homer.” (Kerr was such a home team guy that even Johnny Most would probably be embarrassed with “Red” Kerr’s unseemly rooting for them Chicago boys.)

Also, there was this kind of complimentary piece that I attached this card to. It was a poster of Michael in the Chicago sky at night, with the original image of the “canvas rotated” 90 degrees — to borrow an Adobe Creative Suite term — to make Jordan appear to be flying horizontal like Superman. It just seemed to be from the same school of thought, and even graphic designer. The poster’s publisher, Costacos Brothers, even printed that poster during roughly the same year, just eight or nine months later. When I used to burn notebook and blank-white computer paper with my mechanical pencil drawings, with no regard for our rain forests, I would often try to draw the above image of Jordan from the backside of the card: with him hanging almost near-sideways attempting to get that jumper off.