Michael Jordan : Super Athlete

By Kristyne McDaniel

Michael Jeffery Jordan was born in 1963 on February 17th, and retired from the scene from which he exploded when others were beginning to make names for themselves, throughout his prolific career from the Eighties to the Nineties he has been a truly outstanding basketball player and coach.  Jordan has been considered a remarkable asset at both ends of the spectrum in relation to how the sport is played and how it is viewed, and elementally instrumental in making the sport a worldwide forum for fans of all generations and nationalities.

Jordan ended a fifteen-season career with a regular-season average score of over thirty points per game, won six championships with the Chicago Bulls, and currently owns a part in the Charlotte Bobcats.  Jordan is considered by most to be the greatest player of all time, with numerous awards and much acclamation for his abilities, and has appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated a record of forty-nine times since 1983.  He was named Sportsman of the Year by the magazine in 1991, and in 1999, Jordan was named the greatest athlete of the twentieth century by the ESPN sports network.

He was listed as being second only to Babe Ruth in the Associated Press’ list of the top athletes of the century, and his leaping ability has been vividly proven by his feats of dunking a basketball from the foul line, earning him nicknames like Air Jordan.  As a young child in school, Jordan was an athlete that came to skill in three sports at once, and eventually singled this down to basketball after a few seasons of being refused from the varsity basketball team.  Jordan then earned an athletic scholarship to the University of North Carolina, and from there, became a better player over the time spent working with the team-oriented system.

After winning a play of the year award in 1984, he left to join the NBA Draft, and was selected by the Chicago Bulls in the first round as the third pick overall.  Jordan played thirteen seasons for the Bulls and two with the Washington Wizards, was generally used as a shooting guard, and was just as versatile a threat at point guard and small forward.  Throughout his career, Michael Jordan has proved himself worthy of all the attention and praise garnered through his skills and talents, and has since lent his knowledge to coaching.