ABSTRACT
Michael Jordan is perhaps the best and most well-known athlete in the world today. He has attained unparalleled cultural status because of his extraordinary physical gifts, his marketing as an icon of race-transcending American athletic and moral excellence and his mastery of a sport which has become the metaphoric center of black cultural imagination. But the Olympian sum of Jordan’s cultural meaning is greater than the fluent parts of his persona as athlete, family man and marketing creation. There is hardly cultural precedence for the character of his unique fame which has blurred the line between private and public, between personality and celebrity, and between substance and symbol. Michael Jordan stands at the breach between perception and intuition, his cultural meaning perennially deferred from closure because his career symbolizes possibility itself, gathering into its unfolding narrative the shattered remnants of previous incarnations of fame and yet transcending their reach.
