NEW YORK – On the first road trip of his National Basketball Association (NBA) career, in the fall of 2001, Etan Thomas looked out the window of the Washington Wizards’ team bus and was stunned by the crowd around the hotel.

He asked Christian Laettner: “Is this how the NBA is?”

The veteran forward laughed.

“No, young fella,” he said. “This isn’t for us. They’re here for MJ.”

It was lesson No. 1 of Thomas’ two-year tour with Michael Jordan, who had returned to the league from a three-season absence after his last dance with the Chicago Bulls. Along with him came the deluge of lights, cameras, action.

The young, inquisitive Thomas could not help but wonder – What about the activism? Why wasn’t Jordan doing more with his spotlight?

“I was thinking that Michael didn’t lend his voice to causes where he could have helped,” he said in a recent interview.

Jordan played his final NBA game on April 16, 2003, and retired as a six-time champion with many believing, and now still insisting, there was no one greater.

Such conviction has only been heightened by the widespread appeal of The Last Dance, a 10-part ESPN series in 2020 about Jordan’s Bulls, and the current feature film Air, starring Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Viola Davis.

The flip side of Jordan mania was the derision directed at him for appearing not to use his enormous popularity and platform as a premier black athlete for the benefit of social or political change.

For all the interviews he did, what arguably remains the most memorable quotation attributed to him – “Republicans buy shoes, too” – ostensibly rationalised his unwillingness to endorse Harvey Gantt, an African American Democratic candidate in a 1990 North Carolina Senate race against Jesse Helms, a white conservative known for racist policies.

On a broader scale, it reflected the narrative that followed Jordan into the 21st century – that he was a hardcore capitalist without a social conscience.

Sam Smith, the author in whose 1995 book the quotation originally appeared, has many times called it an offhand remark during a casual conversation – more or less a joke – and said he regretted including it. In the ESPN series, Jordan said he made the comment “in jest”.

In recent tumultuous and polarising years, Jordan has become more public with his philanthropy and occasional calls for racial justice.

And given two decades to consider the precedents he set, the boardrooms he bounded into and how he ascended from transcendent player to principal owner of the Charlotte Hornets, the context has shifted enough to ask: Did he actually blaze a different, or perhaps more impactful, trail to meaningful societal change?

Thomas, who after his nine-season NBA career has been an activist, author and media personality, said his reconsideration of the 1990s Jordan narrative began before Jordan retired for good.

He recalled sitting in the Wizards’ training room one day with Jordan and a member of his entourage when Jordan asked him about a book he had noticed Thomas reading. Thomas recalled it was likely Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice.

“That got a conversation going and Michael’s guy started talking about the charitable things he did without publicity,” Thomas said.

“He mentioned an event at an all-white golf club where they let Michael play, but there were no black members, and how Michael threatened to back out if they didn’t change their policy.”

Thomas added: “I told Michael, ‘That’s something people should know and then maybe they wouldn’t be saying the things they do about you’.

“He just said, ‘I don’t do that’. And his guy said, ‘See what I mean?’ After that, I could never hold him up as the antithesis of the activist athlete.”

In “Air”, Davis, portraying Jordan’s mother, Deloris, dramatically foresees momentous change benefiting African American families of modest means after she had engineered a groundbreaking deal with Nike upon Jordan’s 1984 entry into the NBA.

A screenwriter’s indulgent licence, perhaps, but who can argue that Jordan did not actually do a total rewrite of the script in the allocation of corporate revenues to athletes? Or that the Nike deal, which guaranteed him a cut of every shoe sold, does not make him the godfather of the name, image and likeness revenues flowing into the pockets of college athletes today?

For these reasons, Harry Edwards, the sociologist and civil rights activist, said in February 2021 that Jordan should not be scolded for his sole focus on commercial brand-building across the 1980s and ’90s.

He called it “an era where the foundations of power were laid”, ultimately empowering Jordan’s super wealthy descendants to affect communities – for example, in LeBron James’ staunch commitment to public education in his hometown, Akron, Ohio.

Those years, Thomas learnt, followed one strategic mandate – NBA commissioner David Stern’s preoccupation with marketing.

“He was 100 per cent clear in those days – everything was about growing the game,” he said.

Stern, who died in 2020, straddled a fine line between his mostly progressive politics and fear of alienating consumers.

Jordan followed along as a polished yet cautious spokesman on controversies, such as the one that engulfed Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf who, in 1996, was suspended by the league for refusing to stand for the national anthem for religious reasons.

Was this approach the reflection of a man intrinsically averse to risk? Did Jordan share the vision attributed to his mother in this year’s film? Was he unaware that he might have been famous and leveraged enough to have had it both ways – to speak out about social causes and remain a potent pitchman?

James and other more outspoken contemporary stars have adopted that approach – “changed the narrative”, Thomas said – and with the apparent support of Stern’s successor, Adam Silver.

It is doubtful that Jordan, in his day, could have built what he did while doubling as a crusader, said Sonny Vaccaro, who played a crucial role in corralling Jordan for Nike.

“The league had to grow first,” said Vaccaro, who is played in “Air” by Damon.

“Look, Michael had his troubles – with the Republicans quote, the gambling, with some of his teammates. But he opened the door. He changed the world – only no one knew how much he was changing the world until the next century.

“LeBron can only be the way he is today because Michael made it OK for corporations to put their money, huge amounts of money, on athletes, especially black athletes. Over time, their power and voice has grown.”

Essentially, Jordan, at 60, deserves to be viewed through the lens of an evolved narrative, given how high he has raised the bar for athletes outside the lines, a legacy that will resonate far into the future. NYTIMES