This is a landmark that whispers.
The man who reshaped the sports world’s topography to look suspiciously like the patterned bottom of a basketball shoe was born here, in the former Cumberland Hospital, on Feb. 17, 1963. The 10-story brick building is now a homeless shelter, one that critics say is among the worst in New York. There is no hint, no suggestion — not even a small bronze rendering of a wagging tongue — that Michael Jordan entered the world in this place. There are, however, three guards manning a metal detector in the foyer.
But Jordan is here, if not in spirit, then certainly in apparel. On a warm July day, John Anderson is walking down the block where the shelter, the Auburn Family Residence, stands watch. He is wearing a powder-blue North Carolina jersey, No. 23. Jordan’s college jersey. The 42-year-old chef lives across the street from the former hospital.
“Here? Michael Jordan was born here?” he said. “Oh, man. I had no idea.”
He’s not alone. Few people in the Ft. Greene neighborhood seem to know Jordan was born in the former hospital. His parents lived in Brooklyn for only 18 months while James Jordan, Michael’s father, went through mechanic’s training on the GI Bill.
But still, arguably the best basketball player ever, and it’s a relative secret he was born in this spot?
“They should probably make this place much better because of that,” said Shameko Martin, who lives in the shelter with her husband and two children. “Millions of people wear his sneakers and wear his clothes.
“The same way they remember Michael Jackson, his music and how he impacted the world, they should do the same with Jordan. I didn’t know he was from here. There should be something. Something with his name on it.”
Perhaps it’s better like this. Jordan will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame on Friday along with John Stockton, David Robinson, Jerry Sloan and Rutgers women’s coach C. Vivian Stringer. There is very little mystery left to his life story. Most of us know it by heart: from his being cut from his high school varsity team as a sophomore to his standout career and national title with the Tar Heels to his two Olympic gold medals to his short minor-league baseball career to his six NBA titles with the Bulls. From highlight film to “Space Jam.”
From product endorser to Charlotte team executive. From his game-winning basket as a freshman in the 1982 NCAA title game against Georgetown to his game-winner against Utah for the NBA title in 1998, when, with one move and, OK, perhaps an offensive foul, he made the Jazz’s Bryon Russell go stand in the corner.
Golfer, gambler, car-pooler.
So there’s nothing wrong with a whisper of a start. Nothing wrong with some nuance and subtlety and intrigue involving a man who, six years after his basketball career ended, remains near the top of national popularity lists for athletes. Nothing wrong with a little peace and quiet before he made all that noise.
Lest there be any misunderstanding or any tendency toward mythmaking, let the record show that Michael Jeffrey Jordan arrived in this world shoeless, which is to say Nike-less. And he did not have a bloody nose on arrival. Too bad, because we could have offered the perfect diagnosis: early onset altitude sickness.
No, he arrived fairly healthy.
“After Michael’s birth the doctors did keep him a couple of days to be sure that his lungs were clear of some mucus,” said his mother, Deloris.
He would go on to have an impact everywhere he went — even here, in a neighborhood that has known hardship for decades. Anderson, the man in Jordan’s North Carolina jersey, said of the seven friends he was closest with growing up, three are in prison, four are dead.
But knowing that Jordan was born across the street from where he’s standing brings a smile.
“Jordan is one of those players, he made people dream that anybody could do whatever,” he said. “Go from nothing to something. Knowing he was born here makes me feel like I can do anything.”
James and Deloris Jordan came to Brooklyn in 1962 with a son, Larry, leaving their two older children with James’ mother in Wallace, N.C.
James, a sharecropper’s son, was studying airplane hydraulics. Michael was the fourth of five children born to the Jordans. He has two older brothers and an older and younger sister.
There was some question whether he would be born at all. Deloris’ mother had died unexpectedly in the fall of 1962, and it had such an effect on the pregnant woman that her doctor ordered bed rest for a week, fearing a miscarriage.
A few years later, Michael would receive a nasty electrical shock when he touched a live wire.
“I’ve got to believe one thing,” James Jordan told the Tribune in 1990. “One day, God was sitting around and decided to make the perfect basketball player. He gave him a little hardship early to make him appreciate what he would earn in the end and called him Michael Jordan.”
Deloris Jordan does not remember exactly where the family lived during its short stay in New York nearly five decades ago, only that it was in Brooklyn but not the Ft. Greene neighborhood.
Her doctor was in Manhattan, but she went into labor earlier than anticipated, and it was off to Cumberland immediately.
No one could possibly know what the boy would become. Deloris Jordan said she and her late husband certainly didn’t. This wasn’t Earl Woods shaping his son out of the womb into an iconic golfer.
This was a baby who entered the world, made his own way and ended up palming it like a basketball. His appeal would know no barriers. Poor kids would love him. CEOs would love him. They would love his ridiculous skills. Physics would tell them that there is no such thing as hang time, but they would ignore it in the face of firsthand evidence to the contrary. They would love his will to win.
They would love to buy anything from him, from underwear to shoes to sports drinks.
“Michael is one of the most important athletes, obviously. But even beyond that, he’s one of the most important cultural figures in the history of the U.S.,” said Todd Boyd, a University of Southern California professor who has studied sports and culture. “I don’t think that’s in question.
“When you talk about an athlete who clearly dominated his sport but also transcended the sport in terms of his success as a brand, his ability to market products, just what Michael Jordan came to stand for after a while was perhaps the biggest transition anybody’s been able to make from the basketball court to the highest realm of American popular culture.”
He would go on to change the game — what 6-foot-6 player dominates the NBA like that? He would impact people everywhere and make hundreds of millions of dollars doing it.
“In spite of the nonsense we heard when Michael Jackson died and people were trying to make connections between Michael Jackson and Barack Obama, I honestly think it was Michael Jordan in the ’80s who broke down those barriers and became his own brand in the way that Obama is the first president with his own brand,” Boyd said.
The brand of the child who was born in this teeming borough is very simple. During his career, if you mentioned the name “Michael” — one of the most popular and commonplace — chances were good that people would know whom you meant.
And if the name escaped you, the silhouette of a man — basketball in hand, arm stretched over the head, legs splayed en route to a dunk — didn’t.
The former Cumberland Hospital, located at 39 Auburn Pl., closed in 1983 and later was converted into a homeless shelter.
There are 119 families, including 111 children, living there.
Advocates for the shelter’s residents had fought with the city about a lack of heat in the building, and in July, workers were busy installing new windows. There is more work to do.
Two housing developments surround the former hospital. A neighborhood association official said tenants’ average income is $11,000 a year.
Remember how relieved Chicago tourism officials were in the ’80s and ’90s when the city apparently had become more associated worldwide with Jordan than with gangster Al Capone? Capone grew up near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a few Tommy gun sprays from the park and the former hospital where Jordan was born. There’s no escaping Capone, Chicago.
The Ft. Greene Park basketball court is a few blocks from the homeless shelter. On the court this day, nobody seems to care about history.
Between pickup games, there’s a discussion going on.
Most believe LeBron James is better than Kobe Bryant. They know about Michael Jordan, but they live almost completely in the present. A visitor attempts to lead them out of darkness, but they are a product of their time.
“LeBron is the best,” insisted Kelith Appolon, 14. “He has the best shooting percentage, more rebounds, more assists.”
There wouldn’t have been a LeBron if there hadn’t been an MJ. Oh, James would have been the standout baller he has become, but Jordan paved the way, in gold, for all the marketing opportunities LeBron has. And Bryant? He patterned his game, his speech inflections and his mannerisms after Jordan.
Look at these kids standing in a park in the middle of Brooklyn. Twenty-five years after the first Air Jordan basketball shoes arrived in stores, three of the teenagers are wearing Jordan shoes. Another is wearing a Jordan shirt. That is part of his athletic and cultural significance. It’s impossible to separate the basketball career from his career as a marketer for Nike, Gatorade, Hanes and others. But he stands for something, something James and Bryant aspire to but haven’t yet attained. He stands for something all those corporations latched on to: classiness, excellence, accessibility, grace of movement, power. There’s a bearing to him, and no matter what has gone wrong in his life, he has risen above, the way you might expect a former NBA dunk champion to do.
But — kids these days — the players at Ft. Greene Park don’t see the big picture. How, they’re asked, would Jordan have been different if his family had stayed in Brooklyn rather than gone back to North Carolina?
“He would have been tougher,” said 15-year-old Miguel Diaz.
Jordan, one of the most strong-willed players to ever lace on shoes, tougher? Hard to believe.
“You have to fight for everything here,” Appolon said. “You can’t back down.”
How about playing with the flu in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals and scoring 38 points in a victory over Utah? Tough enough for you?
The players believe Jordan’s game would have been different had he stayed here — more outlandish, more bombastic.
“Allen Iverson plays New York basketball,” said Ernest Bastien, 28, from nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant. “He’s not waiting for picks to be set. He takes the ball, crosses you over, tells you about it and just destroys you. That’s New York basketball. It makes you tougher.”
It is pointed out that Iverson hasn’t won a thing and Jordan has six rings. The group concedes that this is true but that Iverson hasn’t exactly had a Scottie Pippen on his team.
LeBron, Kobe and A.I. are Now, and even though the players might wear Jordan’s apparel, they view him as something like the godfather of basketball, a benevolent presence looking down upon something he helped create. But he’s not a player anymore, and thus he’s somewhat out of mind.
Nevertheless, this being New York, you probably won’t be surprised that the players are adopting Jordan as one of theirs.
“He was born here,” said Bastien. “You can’t take the Brooklyn out of somebody.”
