MICHAEL JORDAN WORKED PORTLAND ONE LAST TIME

Michael Jordan and the Portland Trail Blazers will always be linked.

Every sports fan knows the story of Jordan in the ’84 NBA Draft.

But no crying over spilled milk here. No, I’m crying over the time I saw him play in Portland toward the end of his time with the Bulls. Where’s my hankie?

I had a sports pal once. You know about these guys. We went to sports awards dinners. We saw the Dodgers play the Mariners in the King Dome.

And we saw Michael Jordan play what I think was his last regular season game in the Moda Center.

What Is A Sports Pal

My buddy was about thirty years older than me, a man who grew up in Louisville, Kentucky in the time of Cassius Clay. He remembers a skinny kid getting in some roadwork around town.

And he knew my hometown. He’d sailed the world as a Merchant Marine and pulled into Coos Bay more than once. He called it Booze Bay.

He remembered Muhammad Ali as a kid. I countered with Steve Prefontaine. And we were off. He said his favorite baseball team was the Dodgers.

I asked if he’d ever seen them play. He said yes. “I saw them play in Brooklyn.” We got updated after we drove to Seattle for a game.

We left a little early, maybe bottom of the 8th inning, to avoid the crush. After a wrong turn, we were on a road across a lake with the Mariners on the radio. They came back in the bottom of the 9th to win the game.

It must have been exciting, more exciting than heading to Canada with no turn off.

He loved Joe Montana and the 49ers. I was a Dallas Cowboy lifer. At the time, Danny White was the man.

We bet games each week of the NFL football season. The loser paid with a pack of airplane bottle Wild Turkey. We always shared the winnings, but he won a lot more than I did.

A Michael Jordan Ticket

Ed Merchant was a custodian where I worked. It was his last job, and the company gave him a present on the way out: Tickets to the Bulls v Blazers for Jordan’s last regular season game here.

I picked Eddie up at his place just off MLK in NE Portland. The plan was dinner at Tony Roma’s, leave the car, and take the shuttle to the Moda.

It was a good plan.

We ate, took the bus, and found our seats in the 300 level, way up there. I was a little worried about the long stairway and getting down in the crowd.

The game was close at the end with the Blazers taking command. So we left early to avoid the crush.

We found our way to the bus, and this is the weird part. I still wonder if I remember this right, but the bus was my high school team bus, the Bulldog bus. How did it get there? Was it really the same bus? The driver said it was.

We sat near the front and listened to the rest of the game on the driver’s radio.

There I was on the bus I rode to football games in Eugene. We usually lost, so the ride back to North Bend was pretty quiet. It felt like an omen for Michael Jordan and the Blazers.

The game was close near the end. The crowd noise through the radio was hysterical when Jordan took over and won the game in true superstar fashion.

The Last Dance

There’s an article on slate.com with the title: Michael Jordan Is Exactly Who I Thought He Was.

Leave it to a jock sniffer to tell us he was right all along. Was it that hard? Really? What did he learn?

Was Jordan mean to his teammates? Most of them. Did he need to be?

If winning games was the be-all end-all, he did what he knew to do. He’s still a hard-ass today, if that’s a clue.

If he had come to Portland in 1984, Clyde Drexler would have been his Pippen. How would that have worked with Dr. Jack on the bench?

Sports fans know enough about Jordan, as much as we need to know.

Maybe too much? Do you still like Mike?