Playing for Keeps

Focusing on the basketball superstar Michael Jordan, sports historian David Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps (1999) contextualizes the Chicago Bulls player’s rise to fame within the complex sociocultural and economic discourse of the last two decades of the twentieth century. Rather than overly dwell on Jordan’s prodigious skill or personal drive, Halberstam analyzes how his rise can be attributed to the unity of personal triumph, the evolution of media, sheer luck, and general cultural change. The novel was acclaimed for its thorough investigation of the complexity of the sports industry and its relations to economic transformation at the level of the state.

The book cycles back and forth between 1998, the end of one of Jordan’s best seasons, to Jordan’s early years as a basketball player at Laney High in North Carolina starting in 1979. Between these points, he also played at the University of North Carolina under the renowned coach Dean Smith, and for the Chicago Bulls as they floundered in his fledgling years. The latter part of Jordan’s career, the 1990s, signified a huge improvement in his playing ability, such that he is now known as one of the best players of the sport in basketball’s history.

Halberstam characterizes Jordan as both a prodigious athlete at the level of technical skill and a singularly competitive and hardworking spirit. In a section about Jordan’s childhood, Halberstam relates that his parents taught him and his brother, Larry, that talent was a resource that could be thrown away if they were not careful. These formative exhortations compelled Jordan to round out his abilities in all aspects of life, never putting all of his drive into his love for basketball. His various skills later primed him for becoming a public figure: he was attractive, sociable and, therefore, marketable.



At times, Halberstam departs from Jordan’s narrative, examining the larger rise of the National Basketball Association. Critical to Jordan’s success story is the NBA’s evolution, partly owing to David Stern, from a second-rate sporting association to a ubiquitous public symbol and economic power. At the beginning of the 1980s, the college basketball scene was closer than the NBA to being a true “industry”: it was more likely to be recognized and captured more talent and money. Halberstam analogizes the prestige of the NBA at the time to that of professional wrestling. The main moment of shift, Halberstam argues, was the NBA’s 1984 all-star game, which included the inaugural slam-dunk contest that went viral by the day’s standards. The popularity of the contest earned the attention of NBC and a slew of other corporations across industries. Soon, they were asking to sign NBA athletes as brand ambassadors.

Halberstam spends much of the book showing how these economic agents, represented by such personas as Jerry Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause, administrators for the Bulls, leveraged Jordan’s star power to form a mutualistic relationship with the emerging professional basketball industry. He shows how basketball players’ contract salaries boomed exponentially, leading to extreme fortune, but also, occasionally, to the exploitation of the system and the fostering of greed in both owners and players. A key moment that signaled the deeply negative effects of the monetization of basketball was in 1998 when the NBA players organized for a “strike” in protest of the huge salaries taken by their team administrators. Halberstam also dwells on the sheer contingency of the situations that gave rise to people who are now remembered as key agents in NBA history, including the filmmaker Spike Lee, and Bill Rasmussen, who founded ESPN.

Halberstam’s book is not merely a self-contained work of sports history for basketball enthusiasts. It is a work of social history that touches on the cultural, the ethnographic, and the economic. Above all, it tries to humanize the rise to fame of historical superstars by elucidating the sheer luck that propelled them upward, and the personal drive that usually compounded it.