![]() ![]() Still, the Philadelphia victory pushed the Wizards to 2-1. Perhaps then it should have been obvious what a bad idea Jordan's return to the NBA really was. The Jordan he knew was from television, not this older, slightly paunchier facsimile who referred to the rest of his teammates as "the little guys" in his news conference that night. But Hamilton had been in college when Jordan won his last championship. Jordan's Chicago teammates never questioned his omnipotence openly. At the time his words seemed almost like blasphemy. "Nobody on this team considers himself a Jordanaire," he said. When I asked Wizards guard Richard Hamilton, then in his third NBA season, what he thought about the nickname a national television broadcaster had made up for the team – "Michael Jordan and the Jordanaires" – he shook his head. Now he was 38 on a strange team and already there were chips in the wall of reverence his teammates had always built for him. It had been three years since he walked away from that Finals winning shot in Salt Lake City. This wasn't Chicago, where he had become the greatest player in the world. He scored 20 points in a victory over a Philadelphia 76ers team that was missing its best player, Allen Iverson. Jordan played well enough that night, just as he did in the two seasons of his third comeback. He mumbled a couple of words about being glad to be back playing basketball and then he was gone. The Japanese reporter handed Jordan a DVD as a gift. Jordan, as had become his custom too, declined. The man, as a matter of routine, asked Jordan to let him interview him. He smiled wanly at the Sports Illustrated writer, a man with whom he was friendly, but whose magazine he hated for once imploring him to give up his brief baseball career. ![]() It was cold in the arena, which also houses a hockey team. The Wizards had just finished their morning shootaround. "This is an elite opportunity!" shouted a man who walked Jordan to us. We stood in an area beneath the stands of what was then called the MCI Center – myself, a reporter from Japan and a writer from Sports Illustrated. And yet he already seemed tired by it all. WASHINGTON – This was on the morning of the first home game, back in November 2001, when there was still hope for Michael Jordan as a Washington Wizard. ![]()
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