I just love the juxtaposition in that Lebron seems like he's actually a decent ROLE MODEL, while Jordan is such a piece of shit that people only refer to his LEGEND, as if he's already dead, lol.
I guess during Jordan's time maybe Magic Johnson was enough of a lightning rod for the racists with his HIV diagnosis that Jordan managed to avoid their racist scrutiny?
Like when I was a kid I remember playing JORDAN vs BIRD and picking your favorite player based on whether you preferred shooting 3s or dunking. I loved dunking, so I always picked Jordan. How was this a vidya game without all the racists picking BIRD's side? Was there more racism than I remember but I was just naive because I was a little babby kid? Did racists hate the OG SPACE JAM?
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Lol, I remember that game. It was always Jordan for me, too.
Maybe I too, was blinded by naivete as a youngster, but I don't recall the NBA (or NFL) of the 1980s and 1990s to be riven with political lines. For the most part, it did seem like players just played, and didn't rock the boat, but that might also have been because owners were more powerful back then?
However, I distinctly remember several things from my youth that, in retrospect, showed that Murrica was still Murrica under the surface.
The Larry Holmes - Gerry Cooney fight was among the first boxing matches I ever recall watching, and I remember that my dad and all his friends (as vanilla as a North Dakota country club) were all cheering for Cooney. Larry Holmes was about as bland and non-threatening and a real upstanding citizen as a black heavyweight champion could be, (especially on the heels of the Muhammad Ali era) but Murikkka still wanted some BUM to beat him just because his peel was white.
The second was how hated the 1980s Miami Hurricanes were. As a budding USC fan, I couldn't stand Notre Dame and their whole holier-than-thou attitude, as if they were the "hardworking blue-collar Rust Belt and Midwestern sons of farmers and coal miners and bus drivers," etc. (Read: upstanding humble whites) while the Hurricanes were THUGGGGZZZ who were all gangbangers and drug pushers and pimps and murderers whose mothers were whores and fathers were Colombians carteleros. So, I cheered for the Canes and loved their swag and how in-your-face they were about beating your ass - mainly because it exposed the hypocrisy of basically every other team (but especially ND) that believed that their sainted players weren't also a bunch of bloodthirsty assholes on the gridiron.
Then of course there was the whole Lakers-Celtics rivalry which basically boiled down to: if you believed yourself to be a white, hardworking, law-abiding, God-fearing citizen of Rock Ridge, then you had to cheer for Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Danny Ainge, and the ghosts of Red Auerbach, against the heathen tide from the land of fakery, Showtime, Magic, etc.