Rebound: The Odyssey of Michael Jordan
These thoughts kept returning to me as I read Rebound, Bob’s second hagiography of Michael Jordan. Bob’s first book on Jordan, Hang Time, eclipsed Lives of the Saints. This time out, Jordan leaves basketball, tries baseball, then returns to basketball, while Bob dogs his steps like a pull-toy duck.
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Bob starts out by dismissing any information about Jordan that doesn’t come from first-person interviews. He spurns basic journalistic research–what he calls “arm’s-length analysis, gleaned from nameless sources and third-party observers.” It’s an obvious shot at Tribune writer Sam Smith, whose two tell-all biographies of Jordan have been published at the same time as Bob’s tell-almost-nothing books. Nature could not permit a view as fawning as Bob’s to come into being without its antipode.
Fame mesmerizes him. Bob just can’t get over television. Again and again he digresses about how the world is “wired and linked up, the hardware of international communications ready to take anything [Jordan] says and disperse it across the globe in an instant.” And on and on.
