55

	MIN	FG M-A	FT M-A	RB O-T	A	PF	TP
JORDAN	39	21-37	10-11	0-4	2	3	55

There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die.
—THOMAS WOLFE, on New York City

On March 27 of this year, on a Monday afternoon flush with the balm of spring, Michael Jordan arrived in Manhattan and checked into the Plaza Hotel . That evening he and four companions, including NBC commentator Ahmad Rashad , met for dinner downtown at Robert De Niro 's Tribeca Grill. These were old friends, determined to liberate Jordan from the prison of his hotel room—to "keep it regular," as Rashad says. The game that Jordan and his Chicago Bulls were to play the next night against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden was only indirectly alluded to, but throughout the evening Rashad sensed something about Jordan—sensed that Jordan knew that if he had something to say, New York was the place to say it.

When Jordan returned to the hotel after midnight, CBS 's Pat O'Brien was waiting for a previously scheduled interview. Jordan had stood him up for more than three hours, but O'Brien had spent that time well, drawing up the most prescient of questions. "When will fans see an explosion," he asked, "the kind of game in which you score 55 points?"

"It's just a matter of time," said Jordan.

Jordan wasn't accustomed to being measured against his past. Until he stepped away from the game for 17 months, beginning in October 1993, the public had always spun its wonderment forward, asking the question, "What's he gonna do next?" But with his return, the public imagination now ran backward, and to Jordan the rephrasing of the usual question must have come with daunting psychological g-forces: Can he possibly do those things again?

And, oh, those things he had done. There had been that moment during his final season at North Carolina , in the dying seconds of a victory at Maryland , when Jordan made off with a lazy Terrapin pass and threw down a breakaway dunk stunning in its suddenness, its playfulness, its remorselessness. As Jordan sat in the locker room, his eyes intent on the latticework of his shoelaces, a reporter asked him if he had intended the dunk to "send a message."

"No messages," he replied, scarcely looking up, like an efficient secretary.

Back then Jordan had no need to gild his game with ulterior meaning. But things were different now, 11 years, three NBA titles, two Olympic gold medals, his father's murder and a bush-league baseball misadventure later. Based on the first few games of Jordan's comeback from his sabbatical in the Chicago White Sox organization, a columnist in Florida had already declared him "finished." One New York tabloid had dubbed him FAIR JORDAN. And Doug Collins , an NBA analyst for Turner Sports who had been Jordan's coach with the Bulls and soon would become coach of the Detroit Pistons , had committed apostasy. He had called Jordan "human."

So it was that, carrying a new uniform number, 45, and these fresh burdens, Jordan found himself in New York with a message to deliver. While you were out....

In a hype-saturated age, before a hypeinured crowd, in a building whose owners have enough chutzpah to call the place "the world's most famous arena," Jordan did more than live up to his extravagant billing that night. In his fifth game and 11th day back in the league, he somehow surpassed it. He did, indeed, go for 55 points against the Knicks—more than anyone had scored in the new Garden since it opened in 1968 and the highest total to that point in the NBA season. Dunking but once, he scored blithely, over and around six different members of a team notorious for its defense, until it came time to win the game. Then he did so with a pass.