ABSTRACT
MICHAEL JORDAN is WIDELY acclaimed as the greatest athlete who ever lived, named “Athlete of the Century” by the ESPN television network. Yet he is also a major media spectacle on a global scale, combining his athletic prowess with skill as an endorser of global commodities. In Michael Jordan, globalization, commodification, sport, entertainment, and media come together to produce a figure who serves as a totem of athletic achievement, business success, and celebrity. Yet Jordan's participation in a series of scandals and periods of bad press, mixed with his usually laudatory media presentation, captures the contradictions of spectacle culture, illustrating that those who live by media spectacle can also be brought down by its cruel omnipresent power and surveillance.
