3 Chapter Three: Michael Jordan’s Playground (1990)

“Enigmatic by Design” could be a chapter title in a proverbial Michael Jordan storytelling playbook. Jordan is a fantastic main character for so many reasons and one of them is he is so rarely ever willing to give you the full story. He gives you his story and he does it in such a way that all but ensures the presence of key embellishments and omissions. What those embellishments and omissions might be are for him to know/believe in, and for you to find. Every single Jordan story has more threads to keep track of than there are in all of season two of Lost.

It’s difficult to tell if Michael Jordan’s Playground as a film is purposefully enigmatic or not. A curious detail you uncover while doing a minimal amount of research is that all contemporary listings of the film refer to it simply as Playground. Snyder’s fairly extensive Wikipedia page mentions several celebrities, but there’s not a single mention of ever working with Jordan. A directorial credit for Playground in 1990 is listed in the “Short Films” grid at the bottom of his “Career” section, but there are no additional links or information included. If Michael Jordan requested to have his name removed from this project, then all the power brokers of the Internet seem to have obliged.

• Question No. 1: When and why was Michael Jordan’s name wiped from the Internet’s mentions of Michael Jordan’s Playground?

Because the film goes out of its way to make it abundantly clear that it’s called Michael Jordan’s Playground, that is how we will continue to refer to it. The film is less clear on just what type of film it is. The first two minutes suggest it’s another run-of-the-mill Jordan doc, but louder and with more slow motion! After MJ addresses the audience on the idea of falling in love with the game and the playground as a stage for where an epic fantasy can unfold, we get a montage lasting three minutes and twenty seconds. Jordan dunks a lot in this montage, and when he’s not dunking, players like Clyde Drexler, Magic Johnson, Karl Malone, and Mitch Richmond are saying nice things about him. Basketball highlights and accompanying testimonials from basketball players? Sounds like a basketball documentary. But then, Snyder fades us all to black and brings us all into a completely different story.

IMDB may list the film without my G.O.A.T.’s name in the title, but the site’s synopsis of the film leaves little doubt as to who’s playground this is:

This made-for-video production mixes highlights of Michael Jordan from the ’80s with a fantasy storyline of a high school teen named Walt, who has been cut from his basketball team. Doubting his abilities, Walt gets some lessons from Michael Jordan himself, on the magical Playground known as Michael Jordan’s Playground.

After some slick dissolve-resolve action from Snyder at the break of the opening credits we are back! We’ve moved from the lonely outdoor hoop into the indoor gymnasium at Eastside High School, a possible rival of Saved by the Bell’s Bayside High School. We’re never explicitly told whether or not Michael Jordan’s Playground is in the Saved by the Bell universe.

There’s more basketball. There’s no Jordan in this scene, but there’s more slow motion. There are a lot of 35-year-old actors portraying high school basketball players in slow motion. Perhaps the only appropriately aged actor in the whole scene is Tyrin Turner, then 18 years old and still three years away from making his big break as Caine in Menace II Society. Turner plays a kid named Walt who desperately wants to make the team at Eastside High, and his effort on the court shows his determination, even in slow motion. Perhaps Michael Jordan isn’t the main character of this story after all.

A Brian Denehy doppelganger playing a coach whose name appears to be “Coach,” blows his whistle and brings an end to the scrimmage and to the slow motion (but just for a little while). All the players take a seat on the bench to find out if they made the team or not. Coach not only announces the names one at a time so that every single impressionable teenager can see one another in a moment of triumph or failure, but also reads the names off in front of the team’s cheerleaders, who are just casually watching dreams shatter from the front row. No matter what Steppenwolf does for the rest of the entire DC Extended Universe, Snyder will never craft another villain quite like Coach.

Coach reads name after name of Eastside Varsity hopefuls off his list while Walt waits hopefully at the end of the bench. When he reaches the end, and tells the ten players now standing behind him what time they should show up to practice tomorrow, the audience can pinpoint the moment Walt’s heart goes from optimism and anticipation to devastation and anguish.

The camera lingers on Walt, who is one of a handful of players who didn’t make the team, but looks totally alone in his spot at the end of the bench. At the end of the world. At least at the end of his basketball-playing world as he knows it. Coach dismisses the team he’s chosen and calls for attention from the young men whose hearts he just broke in front of the cheerleading team. Michael Jordan is not physically in this scene, but his spirit permeates through the wisdom Coach imparts to the young men in front of him going through all the stages of grief that come with getting cut from your high school basketball team.

“Alright, for those of you guys that didn’t make it, I’d like to tell you something,” Coach starts. “Michael Jordan got cut from his high school team. Then he came back, and he came back a better ball player.”

This vague and factually inaccurate (more on this later) assessment of Michael Jordan’s high school basketball experience leaves a lot to be desired from both an acting and teaching perspective, but it is also the only actual coaching we see Coach do in the entire film. For all the scene’s flaws, Coach’s words do spark a fire within Walt. They also spark a fire within Snyder, who seizes the opportunity to combine his two true loves of slow motion and montage to show us how Walt navigates the 365 days following tryout heartbreak in fewer than 30 seconds.

Dueling voiceovers between Walt—while he shoots buckets at Michael Jordan’s magic playground before he knows it’s Michael Jordan’s magic playground—and Coach inform the audience that:

“I like to play alone anyway! I don’t need to be part of the team!”

“Don’t forget, Michael Jordan got cut too.”

“What am I, crazy?! I don’t need to be kicked around again.”

“I expect to see all of you back here next year. All of you!”

Snyder brings us out of the slow-motion montage to present day. A year has passed and it’s now the “eve of next year’s tryouts” and Walt angrily dribbles the ball from his right hand to his left and back again. He’s standing at the top of the key, preparing to shoot his shot, and mocks the advice Coach gave him almost exactly one year ago.

“I want to see you guys here next year,” Walt spits. “I bet you Michael Jordan never even got cut!”

The chimes accompanying Walt’s cutting words as he puts up another shot serve as the final clue that we’re not in an ordinary documentary anymore, if we ever were. Snyder’s beloved slow-motion effect returns, and the ball flies towards the hoop in a manner that can only be described as majestically. Something’s afoot. Someone approaches. The audience simultaneously knows who it will be and is still just as mystified as Walt when he appears.

Walt’s shot kisses the front iron before falling through the fibers of the net as magical chimes provide the soundtrack. The ball hits the backstop at an angle that makes it roll away from Walt and towards a presence we’ve felt looming over Walt’s story since the film’s first slow-motion-pan-flute-dunk.

The ball rolls (again in slow-motion, of course) until it’s stopped by a Jordan 5 covered foot at the elbow of the court. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Michael “Air” Jordan making his Hollywood debut. He’s less than a year away from his first championship and his sixth signature shoe, he’s two years away from becoming the first sports star to have his own signature meal at McDonald’s with the McJordan Special (which was basically the exact same quarter-pounder with cheese, bacon, BBQ sauce, and onions as the current “Angel Reese Special” at McDonald’s but also had mustard), but he has the aura of someone who’s label as the G.O.A.T. is already inevitable.

Jordan enters the film holding a level of magic and wonder equal to Ian McKellen in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when he’s resurrected as Gandalf the White and meets Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas in Fangorn Forest. While Gandalf the Gray could only evolve to Gandalf the White after he slayed the powerful demonic monster of the Balrog, the audience knows it won’t be long before Jordan finally conquers his own personal Balrog, aka the Detroit Pistons. Would anyone even be surprised if we found out Dennis Rodman really came from the Mines of Moria and was also part Balrog?

Walt looks at Jordan almost the exact same way Aragorn looks at Gandalf. It’s impossible. “It cannot be,” Aragorn even says. It’s not easy to comprehend suddenly finding yourself in the presence of a god or a wizard (unless it’s a Washington Wizard, which Jordan goes on to become 11 years after the filming of Michael Jordan’s Playground).

“Nice shot, I see you’ve been practicing,” Jordan smoothly delivers his first line of dialogue in his Hollywood debut. “I know you like to play alone, but you don’t mind if I shoot with you, do you?”

Walt can’t move, let alone speak. Our protagonist just stares.

Jordan tells Walt, “I’ll take that as a yes,” in the same declarative tone as Gandalf when he informs the Fellowship “I come back to you now at the turning of the tide.”

The tide of Michael Jordan’s Playground has officially turned with the arrival of Jordan himself. His appearance is clearly magical and not coincidental. There are too many fantasy elements at play here. Jordan roaming the blacktops of Los Angeles looking for kids who got cut from high school basketball teams to inspire in his spare time is an amusing synopsis that could make for a great comedy, and lucky for us, Jordan will go on to provide many comedic moments (both intentionally and unintentionally) in the films to come. This is a fantasy. Not only for Walt, and not only for the audience, but for Jordan as well.

It’s tempting to dismiss the film as just another silly piece of 90’s nostalgia. It does pose the question: Why would Jordan want to star in a movie where a random kid doubting Jordan’s personal history as he makes a basket can summon him to his service like a genie (Disney’s Aladdin hadn’t come out yet, so we were still a year or two away from Robin Williams making genies look cool)? It’s more than all that. Even before he had won his first championship, before he even got past the Pistons in the playoffs, Jordan was always a basketball player well aware of the lore and the mythology that surrounded him. Michael Jordan’s Playground wasn’t just an opportunity for him to build his film reel for the inevitable day when a movie like Space Jam came knocking. It was an opportunity for him to tell his own version of the events of his past. It didn’t matter if it went to a big audience or a small audience. It was a chance to enter his own personal propaganda into the zeitgeist, a chance that he seizes within the first interaction between himself and Walt.

“What are you doing here?” Walt finally finds the breath to speak a few words after the pregnant pause between himself and the best basketball player on the planet lasted for a moment too long.

Instead of answering Walt’s question, Jordan responds with a question because he is not here to be questioned. This is Walt’s story, but it’s Jordan’s world. He asks the questions. He sheds the light on the things he wants you to see and he casts the shadows on the details he wants to keep in the dark.

“Do you know who Leroy Smith is?” Jordan asks.

“No.” Walt answers.

“He was the last guy to make my high school basketball team.”

“So you did get cut!”

Walt arriving at the conclusion that “yes, Michael Jordan must have been cut after all,” after learning the name of a single person who made the basketball team at Jordan’s high school over a decade ago is a bit jarring. It’s not the best piece of acting in Turner’s impressive acting career. I never said it was a perfect film.

Jordan adds a sprinkle of context before moving onto the next chapter of our story.

“My sophomore year,” he answers. “I mean, I really worked on my game. Of course I grew four-and-a-half-inches, and that didn’t hurt at all, but I think it really helped my confidence and my determination.”

This may have been the first instance of Leroy Smith catching an on-camera stray from his former high school teammate, but it wouldn’t be the last.