STEVE KERR, who shot the winning points as the Chicago Bulls took their fifth NBA title in seven years on their home court this weekend, should have had something different to say.
Playing on the same team as Michael Jordan, being about the same age as Jordan, and having like Jordan lost hiss father through murder, perhaps there would be the closeness of equals. On the other hand, having been punched in the eye by Jordan at training one afternoon for not working hard enough, perhaps there would be distance. Instead, in common with the rest of the world, there was just adulation.
"I'm just so thankful to be able to be a team-mate of Michael's," said Kerr, "because this opportunity would never have presented itself without Michael's presence. He's so unbelievable, and he's so good that he draws so much attention. And his excellence gave me the chance to hit the game-winning shot in the NBA finals. What a thrill."
Jordan had just played in his fifth NBA finals, just won his fifth award as the most valuable player of the NBA finals, just underlined yet again that nobody anywhere in the world in any sport is as far ahead of the rest of their game as Jordan is ahead of his.
What is remarkable about Jordan is not the astonishing periods he spends flying through the air - his hang time - nor the manner in which he has developed, late in his career, the "fallaway jump shot" whereby his body moves backwards away from the defending player even as he launches his shot; what is remarkable is his hardness and his hunger.
Through the play-off series during the month of May, Jordan has single-handedly dismantled all pretenders to the NBA throne. Taking the resistance of the Miami Heat franchise personally, he went out and finished the series with an epic, barnstorming performance in the first quarter of the fourth game.
Against Utah, in the finals, he was even more indomitable. With seven seconds left on the clock in the firsts game and the sides level, Jordan took the ball, drew the tackles, watched the clock and - swoosh - as the buzzer sounded to end the game the ball was dropping through the Utah net and Jordan was shaking his fist.
He won the second game on his own, then, having seen Utah strike back, he resisted a bad case of food poisoning to score 38 points in the filth game. He wrapped up the title and the season on Friday night with 39 points and the pass which gave Kerr the title-winning shot.
It is hard to think of another living sportperson who can will a victory the way Jordan can. He has long since dropped the insensitive references to the rest of his team as "his supporting cast". Other people think it now. Jordan doesn't have to say it.
It all adds to his lustre and his, wealth. He has been the front man for Nike since coming into the NBA with the Bulls in 1984-1985, makings a startling advertisement where he hung in the air (in slow motion) for the last 10 seconds of the ad. This was followed up with a series of two-handed ads with Spike Lee.
"What Nike have done," says Jordan, "is turn me into a dream." His Air Jordan line of shoes alone dance" off the shelves to the tune of $275 million in sales every year. Jordan takes a five per cent royalty on the net wholesale price of each shoe sold, a similar royalty on all other goods bearing the Air Jordan logo, plus a fee of $7 million year.
That is just the tip of the corporate iceberg. Besides his royalty-plus-fee deal for the US record (at the time) grossing Space Jam movie, he launched his own brand of cologne last Christmas, racking up over 1.5 million units in sales, and he has his chain of Michael Jordan restaurants. He is the frontperson for a wide list of products: Oakley sunglasses, Coca-Cola, Gatorade, Hanes, Chevy, McDonalds, Ball-Park frankfurters, Ray-Vac batteries, Wheaties.
Once, when his career was dogged by allegations of large gambling losses on the golf course, a businessman claimed that Jordan owed him 51.25 million as a result of bets. Jordan denied the precise figure, but reassured fans by explaining that, while it seemed a lot of money, for him losing $10,000 per hole in a game of golf was like "losing $20 for most people". There was no other way to put it.
Even though until last year the Chicago Bulls wage structure left Jordan with a wage of just $3 million (not sufficient to put him in the top 30 wage earners in the NBA), Jordan has been the biggest earning sports star on the planet for the last seven years. By a long way.
In the last two years the Chicago Bulls have addressed his pay position by supplying successive one-year contracts for the superstar which have netted him $55 million all told.
Strangely, however great the price or tough the dealing, Jordan gives value. He delivers. The value of the Bulls franchise has increased ten-fold during his time there. Nike has been built off his back. As the player who spends the most minutes on court in a gruelling, 82-game regular season in which he plays every game, Jordan gets more exposure than just about anybody else in sport. Little wonder that when he announced his retirement from basketball in 1993 the Dow Jones index took a dive.
Wall Street needn't have fretted. After a year pursuing a modest baseball career, in homage to his father who was murdered just three months before his retirement, Jordan came back to the Chicago Bulls, and in his two full seasons with them has led them not just to a couple of NBA titles but to last year's regular season record of 72 wins. A little piece of history which Jordan had been anxious to mop up.
This weekend, with his status as the greatest basketball player ever well beyond dispute, he has been cajoling the Bulls management to keep the team and its manager together, to tattoo their names on history's forearm. With Jordan threatening permanent retirement to the golf course if they don't comply, there can be but one response. Be like Mike. Just do it.
