The wisdom of Michael Jordan

The king of basketball.

Does being the best basket- ball player ever make you smarter?


Best answer:  It can't hurt. But it really doesn't necessarily make you smarter. Richer? Yes. Smarter? That depends on what you start with.

Jerry Lucas

Take Jerry Lucas for example. (Jerry Who? Aha! you are too young.)

Lucas led the Ohio State Buckeyes to three successive  NCAA titles starting in 1960 and was on the USA Olympic basketball team that won the Gold Medal  gold medal in the 1960 Games. He had a spectacular NBA career and in 1980 he was inducted to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

But was he smart?

Wikipedia talks about "Lucas displaying a remarkable, if unusual intelligence. A straight-A student with a penchant for memorizing his school work, Lucas had started to develop memory games for himself as early as age nine. One trick he would be known for was his ability to take words apart and reassemble them quickly in alphabetical order. "Basketball" became "aabbekllst." He also applied his intelligence successfully to his later coaching in the game."

Bill Bradley

Then there was U.S. Senator Bill Bradley who played spectacularly for the New York Knicks winning NBA titles in 1970 and '73. He was a Rhodes Scholar. So basketball does have players with 'smarts."

There are others, of course, but I promised you the wisdom of Michael Jordan, so here it is:

If you have been watching ESPN's 10-part series, The Last Dance, featuring Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bull's fascinating trials and travails in their "six-peat" run to that final NBA Championship in 1999, you might have seen Michael's statement that so typifies where we, as the USA... as the world, sit today.

When faced with a potential career-ending broken foot injury in 1985-86 (his second year in the NBA), he was forced to sit out six weeks of the season. He was so competitive that he was willing to put his career on the line to play. It was then that Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, after consulting with doctors, conferred with Jordan.

"You're not understanding the risk-reward ratio," he told him. "If you had a terrible headache and I gave you a bottle of pills. And nine of the pills would cure you. And one would kill you, would you take the pill?"

Michael looked at him and said, "It depends on how bad the f---ing headache is."

So the take-away is that Michael understood the risk-reward ratio. The fabled wisdom I'm talking about is that he didn't choose to take the pill, which didn't leave him happier, but still playing out his career until he called it quits.

So America, same question: Are you willing to put your life on the coronavirus age line when one choice is NO and the other has a 10 percent chance of possibly killing you and/or loved ones you contact with?

It's anyone's guess on exactly what the odds are, but I'm thinking, that ratio doesn't sound too out of line. Problem is, if the ratio is absolutely correct, then the probability for guessing wrong grows exponentially beyond just you.

Final quiz question: Yes, the NBA does have smart players, but what is the number 1 statistic that is the most common to all players, not counting wealth?

Answer: Tattoos. About 53% of the players have tattoos.

Final Fun Fact: Think Michael Jordan isn't King Midas? A 1985 pair of his autographed Air Jordan shoes which he actually wore in a game go on auction this week. It is expected they will cost the lucky winner more than $160,000. My guess it will be a woman. I don't know many men who have more than a few pair of shoes, often bought for him by his wife who knows the value of shoes.