The Cult: Michael Jordan

Michael Jordan is the American Dream. The hard-scratch upbringing and countless encounters with adversity before eventually, with bleeding fingers and a thousand-yard stare, you arrive at what could plausibly be described to the Joneses as the summit. No, not that one: getting a gigantic endorsement deal and just balling the fuck out until everyone around you ceases to see any point in turning up. The cool one, as impossible as its previous incarnation, but a lot more exciting.

Despite America's lauded republicanism, when it comes to their favourite thing – entertainment – they can't resist a little monarchy. The King, obviously. The King of Pop. The Queen of Pop. Queen Celine. And for Jordan, the best of them all: His Airness. Giver of not one but two symbols to The Cult. Any sportsman, anywhere, from LeBron James (whose recent triple-double efforts to be to Cleveland what Michael was to Chicago made your hair go slightly grey to watch) to Jonny Evans, to Clint Dempsey, to Shola Ameobi: when they pull on the number 23 shirt, they are trying, consciously or not – and for some of them I hope it's not consciously – to own the holy fire of winning. Then, the Jumpman icon of the Air Jordan brand. In 2012, nine years after he last shot a ball, the Air Jordan line outsold LeBron in the U.S. six to one. Put on these relics, kid – they'll make you fly.

The Chicago Bulls remain the NBA's second-most-valuable franchise after the Lakers. They are ahead of the San Antonio Spurs and Miami Heat, winners of five and three championships respectively since the Bulls last won a bean. In 2014, as in 2011, they sold the most merchandise, having not got within a realistic sniff of the Finals since 1998; that was MJ's last game for them.

It's because wearing the Bulls jersey is wearing the sporting equivalent of the Turin Shroud. Outside the United Center in Chicago, Jordan's statue, officially known as The Spirit, shows him cast in bronze, twiglet legs soaring beyond a shapeless mass of regular humans.

And this is where I think he really gets the traction, the Tom Cruise persona in The Cult: he fulfils that daydream in all of us, that if we're not there, our team becomes nothing. Jordan won three NBA Championships in a row from 1991-93; then he quit. The Bulls didn't win. Then he came back. The Bulls won another three in a row. Then he quit. They haven't won since.

Two three-peats with the same guy. If you know American sports you know that's big: he and the icon of an old world, Joe DiMaggio, are alone with the feat. And DiMaggio, despite looking like a frog's younger brother, got to repeatedly take Marilyn Monroe to bed as his reward. Jordan got screentime with Bugs Bunny.

Phil Jackson, the coach who was there if a team was winning in the '90s, talks in that way only Americans can (i.e seriously) about the semi-mystical power to own entirely the moment you are in, in order to score two points with a basketball. Game six of seven. Bulls lead the series 3-2. 17 seconds remaining. Jazz lead the game by 1. Jordan approaches the arc. And, in that moment, you can

feel

what Jackson meant. It was like the score had been precisely calibrated at 85-86 to allow Jordan one last play, to wind off some clock, weigh up his surroundings, then half-slash into the D and instantly stutter-step, leaving his less gifted marker haplessly sliding away off-stage. Then there was all the space and time in existence for His Airness to line up a mid-range jumper, execute, and win the third championship in a row with his last shot for the Bulls.

Afterwards Jackson hugged him and said 'Oh my god, that was beautiful', sounding like a loved up hippie.

Yeah. Not great these days. What do you think of LeBron? 'I was better.' What about Kobe? 'Who?' Kobe Bryant. 'Yeah, right.. I was better. Did he say that I wasn't?' Hard to imagine a happy retirement for the kind of mental state that allowed MJ to be who he was, and his face now, heavier-set and grizzled around the chops, would bear that out: high-stakes golf rounds and owning a non-entity of an NBA team just aren't going to cut it when you spent your prime glowering at Patrick Ewing and Charles Barkley and Karl Malone. In a recent interview he seemed permanently on the verge of using his chair to better get his point into the interviewer's head, like an American Roy Keane.

At the time, though, as the juices of America's number one flowed in his veins, his smile lit up the arena. There was always something wolfish to it, something deliberately unsettling; one of my favourite MJ clips is him taunting Dikembe Mutumbo, one of these gigantic trees incapable of scoring freethrows, by showing him how to do it with your eyes closed. It's meant in jest, but the jest of a guy happy to know your weakness. And boy, could he jump. And climb a few paces in the air.

And gamble. Here's His Airness in the New York Times, the morning after being spotted in a baccarat pit in an Atlantic City casino at 2am on the day of an Eastern Conference Finals game: 'If the Bulls are to win . . Jordan must be what he is. Basketball's superman, larger than life and lighter than air.' He was none of those things, just a regular underslept human whose mind was probably still addled by pulling low cards into the small hours for tens of thousands at a time. Bulls go 2-0 down. They win the series 4-2. Here's Superman again, at Portland Airport with the rest of his team: he bets them 50 bucks apiece that his luggage would be first off the carousel. Which it was, because he'd bribed the baggage handlers. Put yourself in the shoes of Steve Kerr, the skinny white backup point-guard dutifully paying Jordan the $50 as a kind of thank-you for allowing you to be on a team that won championships. As a guy on the internet called Julian Kimble artfully puts it, 'being Jordan's friend is the biggest challenge of all created by a man obsessed with them'. The Hope Diamond hangs on its own chain.

@TobySprigings