Injured Jordan Is on Last Legs

Of course Michael Jordan isn’t going to play a second season with Washington if he’s in and out of surgery, on and off the injured list, in and out of the lineup. Doug Collins said it Wednesday, Jordan said it Thursday, and why this has caused a firestorm I have no idea. It’s common sense, nothing else. Collins only said what most of us have felt the last few weeks, since Jordan was forced from the lineup with the first surgery of his career. Jordan, not surprisingly, said exactly the same thing.

“‘I’ve been saying all along that if I’m not capable of playing next year, why would I play?” Jordan said after practice Thursday. “Based on what Doug sees that I’ve been going through as of late, obviously he would have his opinion about it. I’m not mad at him. It’s an observation and as a coach you have observations like that. That would be my observation, too. If I felt this way, I’d be totally surprised if I’m playing next season.”

I’m wondering what else people expect Jordan to say, what other tack he should take.

“I have all intentions,” he said, “of (playing) out my contract. If I physically can’t, if I have to go through the same situation I’m going through right now, it’s not meaningful. (But) you guys are asking me to make a decision about next season now based off the way I feel right now and that’s not really fair.”

In other words, if Jordan feels healthy enough, if he feels physically the way he did approaching the NBA All-Star break when he and the Wizards were on a roll, he plans to play again. If he doesn’t, he won’t.

Is it that earth-shattering for this story to be the lead on sports show or front pages?

Yep, apparently so.

Silly me. When Collins told me Wednesday on the set of ESPN’s “Pardon The Interruption” that he would be surprised if Jordan went through all this again next season, it sounded logical enough to me.

“I’ve been saying all season long that if I’m going to go through surgeries and things like that with my knee I wouldn’t play, it wouldn’t be wise for me to play,” Jordan said. And Collins said, “I don’t know what the big news is. I don’t think anything was said that everybody didn’t know.... It’s interesting how I said nothing yesterday that’s different from what Michael’s been saying all year, but it gets all this attention.”

Collins and I had a momentary lapse. We should both know why it gets all this attention.

Because it’s Michael Jordan.

Beginning in, oh, 1989 a bigger deal was made of Jordan than seemed reasonable at times. By 1992 anything he did was news. When he came back to the game after a 20-month retirement in March of 1995, anything he did and stuff he didn’t do were considered “news.”

Readers, viewers and listeners can’t get enough, neither can most of the people covering him, nor can the corporate sponsors and even people inside the international basketball community. Perhaps it’s a natural reaction when you appear on screen with Bugs Bunny and have a cologne and apparel with your own likeness in the form of a log. Also, it’s insane.

Any declarative sentence spoken by anybody two degrees of separation from Jordan is an absolute story. I told a Post editor back in January of 2000 when Jordan arrived to run the Wizards on a day-to-day basis that I feared covering him would be like covering a second president. Wednesday’s tornado of activity suggests I wasn’t as far off as I’d like to have been.

Collins clearly was caught off guard by the whole swirl, and I don’t blame him. I certainly hope this doesn’t make him guarded all of a sudden, because the reason I have been dying to have Collins as a guest on PTI, the reason I’ve stood in front of him with a notebook or tape recorder for 15 years and counting, is that he’s the best damn basketball analyst ever. He’s the most insightful, to-the-point, dead-on man I’ve ever listened to on the subject of professional basketball. You can watch basketball every day for the rest of your life and see less than half of what Collins sees in half the time.

He didn’t say anything controversial Wednesday, he just made the observation a coach ought to make. Collins wasn’t speaking for Jordan, or disclosing something secret. He made a point that more of us probably should have made earlier, that Jordan is playing on one leg and nowhere near healthy but is doing so to help his team make the playoffs. That’s the larger point Collins made quite eloquently.

But any observation that insightful made by someone that close to Jordan is a big stuff.

My guess, and that’s all it is, is that Jordan will do everything in his control to play again next season. If there’s any way he can stay relatively healthy, he’ll go.