Michael Jordan is in trouble. Cold sweating, knee trembling, back to the wall trouble. He can feel the cool roughness of the brick pressing the nape of his neck, the throbbing in his temple. Just the way he likes it.
It might end this way, the greatest, the most lucrative, the most hype-spangled career in American sporting history, may wind down with defeat and tears. The big bad ass Chicago Bulls being broken by the inhabitants of Planet Clean Cut. Mozart getting whupped by Donny and Marie right here in Salt Lake City.
Jordan and the team he once carelessly described as his supporting cast have just lost the first game of the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals to the Utah Jazz. The game was the first instalment of a series which may stretch to seven games, but the excitement is unlikely to be matched. Jordan drove his team to a comeback as the seconds escaped finally forcing the game into overtime where a critical mistake (by Jordan) handed the impetus back to Utah.
But the memories of Jordan's grace are burned into the collective memory like flashbulb pops. He is at the centre of everything and even the Utah partisans offer up their awe. At 35 years of age he distinguishes himself amidst the sweet ebb and flow of a basketball game, doing things which the mortals around him just gawp at. He slips around the court uncatchable as mercury on a varnished tray.
There is a beauty and a simplicity to Jordan, the sort which every great athlete possesses. The grace in the air, the softness of his touch, the extraordinary sense of lateral perception, and glinting beneath it all the sheer pulsing will of a man who refuses to lose.
Chicago have played well and lost tonight, however, and the the prognosis is poor. Jordan is fatigued after another epic season and the team he leads is perhaps the weakest which Chicago have fielded this decade. Worse. As a result of a mediocre year by their own standards Chicago have ceded home advantage in the first two games of the seven-game series to Utah. Up against it and struggling for air.
So, defiant as ever, Michael Jordan strolls into the press room wearing a wheat-coloured suit, an azure shirt with purple tie and enough diamonds to re-do all the tabernacles in town. No funeral tonight.
"I'm not tired, I'm not fatigued," he says. "We just had an adjustment game. I felt pretty good. "
And America breathes a sigh of relief.
This could be the very last series of basketball games which Michael Jordan ever plays. His departure if and when it comes will send a wrecking ball arcing through the supporting walls of the American public imagination.
Needlessly, too. His coach, the mystical Phil Jackson, has been the victim of some very and very feral infighting and he will spend next year getting in touch with the Zeitgeist or helping Senator Bill Bradley to run for the White House. Either way, Jordan has announced that he will never play for another coach. The greatest career in modern sports history looks like fizzling out because a few men in expensive suits can't rub along together.
Jackson was the first professional coach to tame Jordan, a move commonly attributed to Jackson making inroads into Jordan's affections by asking his teammates to stop bugging him for autographs. If the two disappear over the horizon together there is a fear that professional basketball - with union problems mounting - might follow Jackson and Jordan sometime in the future. Little wonder, then, that Jordan's pending retirement is being treated as the biggest calamity to beset the Windy City since Mrs O'Leary's cow kicked over the lamp. America feels the potential loss like a haymaker about to wind the national morale.
In his 13 years in Chicago, Jordan has come to define the city in much the way that Lake Michigan does. For the last 10 years of that stint, he has been the premier sportsperson in the US, dragging basketball into a position of commercial preeminence and giving the Chicago Bulls organisation a piggy-back out of the swamps of obscurity.
The numbers rain down like a tickertape parade. The man who has scored the most points for the last 10 basketball seasons he has completed has, according to Fortune magazine, had an impact worth $10 billion to the US economy.
Jordan is everywhere, omnipresent. He pitches for Nike, Quaker Oats, Rayovac, Sara Lee, Bijan (Jordan's own-line fragrance. Smell like Mike!), Wilson, CBS and Worldcom and has enjoyed hugely lucrative relationships with McDonald's Coca Cola and Gatorade. Currently with Nike, he is developing his own brand of sports and leisurewear for the golf course or the basketball court.
Jordan is bemused by the incessant speculation about the size of his wealth and the impact he has had on the wealth of others. When you lay all the figures end to end $10 billion looks like a conservative estimate, however.
"No one really knows and nobody can really verify the numbers," says Jordan. "I've always just looked at it as enjoying the game of basketball, knowing there is a business surrounding the game that I play. In some ways it's a privilege. But it's also a burden. I'm not believing what I'm hearing."
When the Bulls play at home in the United Centre in a rundown area on the city's fringes, their presence generates $25 million of spending in the Chicago area. They come to see the man who has scored at least 10 points in more than 800 consecutive basketball games, who has led the scoring in the toughest basketball league in the world for 10 seasons. See the man, buy the T-shirt, wear the cologne.
Jordan's presence in Chicago has made Niketown, right in the heart of the hubrisridden strip known as the Magnificent Mile, the No 1 tourist attraction in the city, with 15,000 callers a day. Not bad for a shoe shop dressed up as a multi-media experience. Nike, the company which virtually re-invented Jordan's personality when it took the decision to stop making ads depicting him in aggressive situations, sell 140 million pairs of sneakers in the US alone each year. Buy a pair with Jordan's name or logo and America's big brother gets 5 per cent of the wholesale price.
Not that he'll starve if you don't invest. When Jordan opened his own restaurant
not far away on La Salle Street, the city helpfully declared Michael Jordan Restaurant Day. Television vans are permanently parked outside the eatery interviewing masticating fans about the experience of eating at Jordan's, performing instant vox pops regarding any issue current to Jordan's life.
And people respond to him. In Atlanta in March they moved what might have been his last game in the capital of the south to the Georgia Dome, a football arena and 62,046 people paid in to watch a basketball game. Some 8,000 of them bought seats knowing that they would have no view of the floor.
In Utah this Wednesday night, the fervent locals have booed every member of the Bulls team as they have appeared on court. Except Jordan. It would be unpatriotic to do so. Jordan isn't just another Chicago Bull.
Jordan is easily the world's top earning athlete. Last year he made $47 million from commercial endorsements (Tiger Woods in the year he won the US Masters made $24 million). Thrown in there on top of that is the $33 million he takes for playing basketball and the royalties for the countless videos, books and movies he stars in. In a survey conducted last month by the Burns agency in Chicago, two out of every three companies asked named Jordan as the person they would most like to have endorsing their products.
On the week in the spring of 1995 when Jordan returned to basketball after a brief odyssey in professional baseball, five of the companies whose lines he endorses had a combined rise in share value of $2.3 billion. McDonald's stock leapt by $1 billion. Nike by $200 million.
It is the memory of that 17-month hiatus which disturbs America. Jordan vanished to the minor leagues of baseball, embarking on a personal odyssey which had its roots in the murder of his baseball-loving father a year previously.
While Jordan was away, his absence was bigger and more significant than all the hype, hoopla and substance of the game he left behind. Basketball existed in state of virtually suspended animation until Jordan made a two-word announcement to the world: "I'm back."
Since then he has rewritten the traditional narrative of American sporting celebrity whereby the athlete arrives, the athlete peaks, and the athlete fades away diminished by scandal, age or over-exposure.
"Every year I wait for the interest to diminish," says Jordan, "for the effect to wear off, for the backlash to begin. So far it hasn't come. I don't understand it, can't understand why people don't get bored."
In the year before Jordan arrived in Chicago, the local basketball franchise was a dowdy, cobwebbed affair which came a distant third in the affections of its city to gridiron and baseball. Average attendance that year was 6,365. Today, the Bulls have been sold out for 10 years solid and there is a waiting list of 23,000 names for season tickets.
There is no sign at all of any withering of the public appetite for Jordan. If gravity doesn't deter him on the court then neither is he barnacled by controversy or the appearance of naked self-interest. When a human rights report two years ago found that Nike employees in Vietnam were paid $1.60 a day for an eight-hour shift during which they were allowed one toilet break, two drinks of water and had their mouths taped if they talked to much, Jordan creased his brow and issued some earnest statements of impeccable moral neutrality. Any other public figure would have been crucified on a cross made from their own ambivalence. Not Jordan. With one bound he was free.
In 1991, at the suggestion of Nike, he opted out of basketball's group licensing programme, taking back his image from the sport which made him and retailing it to the portfolio of companies with which he has commercial associations.
In 1992 he caused a fuss at the Barcelona Olympics, refusing to appear on the winners' rostrum wearing a tracksuit which displayed the logo of Nike's chief competitor, Reebok. Eventually he draped an American flag around his shoulders to hide the logo.
Two summers ago he took a stance against his own union holding out for money for top players and restrictions on what rookie players could earn. The dispute risked splitting his own sport. Jordan emerged unscathed.
His image is part of the American cultural landscape. If the medium was once the message, the branding is the person in Jordan's case. Perceptions of him are as much spawned by the endless moody adverts produced by the slick firm of Weiden and Kennedy as they are by his ability to deliver the perfectly arcing jump shot with two seconds left on the clock.
Take away the 200 or so moody, sumptuously-lit advertisements which have bombarded the American public for the past decade or so and all you are left with is an extraordinary athlete, a bright man about whom the public knows very little.
When Jordan goes he won't leave behind a anthology of memorable quotes for students to ponder. He has never taken a stand on any issue of importance in the world outside basketball, he stands for nothing except the national anthem and the right to be extraordinarily well-paid for being extraordinarily good at putting a ball through a hoop.
Yet there is such a gaping niche in the market for heroes that America has filled in the gaps and coloured between the lines for itself. He has become the role model and poster boy for success itself, for the embrace, the celebration, the choice of success.
"I don't understand the impact or why I have had that impact. I do everything to win and people respond to that maybe, the hard work involved in winning."
That isn't enough, however.
The sentimentality of his constituency is imperishable.
Through the years Jordan has zealously kept his private life off limits. He and his family live in a 29,000-square-foot mansion out to the north of the city in Highland Park. The house is surrounded by a three-hole golf course and contains a full-size basketball court. It is not part of the public imagination in Chicago, however. No sketches are offered up to be coloured in.
Instead, a multi-layered emotional life is created for Jordan anyway. Currently the illness of his 61-year-old bodyguard, Gus Lett, is occupying the Jordan Nation. Gus Lett is recovering from cancer and chemotherapy and made an appearance at Chicago's home game last weekend. Every news outlet in the country gave prominent space to the heart-warming news that Lett, never more than a figure in dark glasses before now, was out and about and feeling good. If Gus is good, Michael is happy.
When Lett went into hospital Jordan looked after the medical expenses and it has been learned that the pair speak to each other as often as three times a week on the phone. Each titbit gives the current struggle for Jordan's sixth NBA championship the quality of a moral crusade. Win for Gus and blow those tumours away.
Tonight in Salt Lake City, Jordan has lost a basketball game but won a small war. He outscored everybody else as usual in a game which went into overtime and would have been won but for a couple of errors. One of the errors was Jordan's and almost all subsequent press inquiries relate to it, as if God had mistakenly smited Salt Lake City and not Chicago.
"I've had enough success to know that you can't win every time. At the end if you lose a game, that's it. It doesn't stick with me. It doesn't drive me nuts. It doesn't keep me from sleeping. I can deal with losing."
Nobody believes him. This is a man who bets $10,000 per hole at golf, who once punched a teammate in the mouth during practice, who takes bets all the way through every practice session that he can't score from here on the halfway line, can't score from here, sitting on the bench.
Jordan winds up his discussion on an upbeat note, announcing that his "desire to win is still fresh and strong". There are more press conferences to come, with other players with equally valid views, but half the press corps packs its bags as soon as Jordan rises to leave.
Behind him to his left on a couple of screens, two different TV stations are in rare synch showing the highlight of the night's action.
Jordan slips through the attentions of three men and launches off his right foot shifting the ball from one hand to the other while in the air, readjusting himself and then slipping the ball through the hoop before he heads earthward again. It is such a remarkable feat of athleticism that it looks for a moment as if it is being shown in slow motion.
Two hundred journalists gape at the screen. The man in the wheat-coloured suit doesn't even glance back. Learning to lose and walk away may be the last lesson that the Messiah of Winning leaves us.