Michael Jordan is an unlikely revolutionary, but one whose drive and ability to market his image and brand changed the game, the NBA, and basketball culture around the globe. One of the greatest players of all time, he racked up six NBA Championships with the Chicago Bulls, more than a dozen NBA All-Star appearances, numerous Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards, and two Olympic gold medals with Team USA (1984, 1992). Jordan’s role as part of the original U.S. Dream Team at the 1992 Barcelona Games captured imaginations around the world and inspired generations of players, alongside his 15-season NBA career played a hugely significant role globalizing the league and driving boys and girls from all six continents to “Be Like Mike.”

On May 26, 2020, the Centre for International Studies & Diplomacy (CISD), SOAS University of London, hosted a virtual roundtable "Michael Jordan and Basketball’s Global Growth" to capture the moment as ESPN airs its new Michael Jordan documentary, “The Last Dance,” a 10-part series addressing his final season as a player with the Bulls.

I was struck by what one of our invited speakers, Alexander Wolff, said about the rise of Jordan in 1990s China, and how it relates to the country’s basketball history. While the sport has long been embedded in China’s DNA, a national team sport by the 1920s and able to survive Mao’s Cultural Revolution when even Beethoven was banished as being too bourgeois, its survival marked the game significantly. Wolff relayed the fact that national basketball players under the Cultural Revolution did not wish to stand out individually, that nobody dared to be a star for fear that coaches would call emergency meeting and point out a player for being too capitalist and too American in their playing style. Wolff also related explanations for why the Chinese adored Jordan so much, aside from his technique and spirit, he was a true star as benefitted their cultural understandings:

“A star must have the regal quality of an emperor and must behave as if everything is under his control as if he’s unwilling to obey anyone else”

So in a way, Jordan was a blank slate onto which the Chinese projected their cultural attitudes, just as others in our discussion pointed out that other societies did, from Europe to Africa and beyond.

This was one quality that helped to make Jordan so marketable around the world. He was famously taken to task for not weighing in on political or social justice issues during his time as a player, though he has given generously—quietly—to a variety of education, social justice, and other community initiatives over the years.

This is all why Jordan’s recent outspokenness about the racial divides in the United States were so notable.

Shortly after our event concluded, the first mass protests against the injustice, systematic racism and policy brutality that led to the death of George Floyd by Minneapolis police rocked the United States—and the world. Jordan and his NIKE division Jordan Brand announced that over the next ten years he/they would invest $100 million to causes that promote social justice and educate about racial inequality. But he also issued the following statement, raising the intriguing question: will one of the world’s Greatest Players of All Time (GOAT) join some of his fellow hoops GOATs, notably Bill Russell, in the fight to end systemic racism and social injustice in the United States? Will Jordan finally take up the mantle of his microphone? To Be Continued…