Culture
For Michael Jordan, it got personal, and now NASCAR could be forever changed
In “The Last Dance,” ESPN’s documentary on the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan never actually said “And I took that personally.” That line is the stuff of memes, but Jordan did not utter it.
What Jordan really said was this: “It became personal with me.” Maybe it’s a small difference, but the actual quote packs more of a punch.
Read it again: “It became personal with me.” Instead of merely saying I’m offended by that, the context translates more to You’ve crossed into different territory now. You’ve awoken something inside of me.
As even the most casual of sports fans know, that’s pretty scary when it comes to Michael Jordan — a man who would rather get a root canal every day for the rest of his life than lose at anything. And if someone thinks they can make Jordan look like a fool while beating him? Buckle up.
Somewhere, hidden between the lines of a 46-page antitrust lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court, that message was sent loud and clear. Less than a month ago, it appeared NASCAR essentially won its lengthy charter battle with race teams by convincing 13 of the 15 owners to sign new agreements. Jim France, the 79-year-old chairman and CEO of NASCAR and a member of its founding family, had seemed to succeed with his old-school approach after many were initially skeptical of his methods.
The owners raised a fuss for more than two years and complained about the terms of the deal, upset at how NASCAR used a divide-and-conquer strategy instead of dealing with them as a group. But ultimately, France held firm and used NASCAR’s weight to strong-arm the teams. When a final deadline was given, almost all of them got in line and signed.
Jordan’s 23XI Racing, along with Front Row Motorsports, suddenly found themselves isolated. The powerhouse team owners like Rick Hendrick and Roger Penske left the holdouts to fend for themselves, and they seemingly had no leverage to do anything about it.
Jordan’s team stood to be the biggest losers after making the most noise, all while looking silly in the process of accomplishing nothing.
“Do they really think they’re going to get a better deal by dragging this out?” one team executive scoffed.
Is it possible that somehow, with all that is known about Jordan, he was still underestimated? If so, that seems like a grave miscalculation. Regardless of the lawsuit’s outcome, NASCAR has a serious case on its hands, brought by the same attorney — Jeffrey Kessler — responsible for changing the landscape in other major professional sports (as well as college athletics).
As of now, it seems hard to believe this situation could actually be decided by the courts. NASCAR and France would have to completely open their books, exposing financial records to the public that provide a first-of-their-kind peek behind the curtain of how the money really flows through big-league stock car racing. After all, it’s more likely NASCAR and the teams would settle, perhaps addressing some of the key items that were rejected or ignored during the negotiations (or lack thereof, if you ask the owners).
Either way, the suit threatens NASCAR’s virtual undefeated streak in matters like these. NASCAR has always prevailed when challenged, with the France family’s ability to retain power and control passed down and practiced over multiple generations. It has given the aura that taking on NASCAR in any significant way will always end poorly, and that’s been largely accepted by those in the garage as the cost of doing business.
Michael Jordan looks on during qualifying at Nashville Superspeedway in June 2023. His 23XI Racing is in its fourth season in the Cup Series. (Logan Riely / Getty Images)
It’s entirely possible that could happen again now, with NASCAR emerging unscathed. Perhaps the courts won’t agree with 23XI and Front Row, and maybe there’s no pathway to a reasonable settlement other than a few minor concessions that allow both sides to declare victory and move on. Perhaps it’s enough just to increase transparency on both sides; while we don’t know the closely held details of NASCAR’s finances, we also haven’t seen the teams’ books (aside from their constant claims of losing money or barely breaking even).
Both parties should show where the money is going, and that might help the sport more than anything. Is it really that the France family is greedy and keeping most of the revenue for themselves? Or are some teams crying poor while actually generating plenty of money? Until that transparency comes to fruition, it’s unlikely both sides will ever truly get on the same page.
This suit could be the catalyst. The longer this goes on, the greater the chance this legal action delivers significant, unprecedented change to NASCAR. And Jordan is not likely to settle for anything less.
“We can’t give you a specific, ‘This will do it.’ There must be significant change,” said Kessler, the attorney. “No one is bringing this type of fight, this type of lawsuit, to move from a (Grade) D-plus deal to a D deal. That is not going to happen.”
And make no mistake: Even though 23XI co-owner Denny Hamlin and Front Row’s Bob Jenkins are fully on board, it’s unlikely all of this would have happened without Jordan.
If Hamlin were on his own, could he really stare down the prospect of losing close to $100 million in charters and not blink? Without 23XI, would Jenkins really be the lone holdout among the team owners and take NASCAR to court by himself?
It’s impossible to imagine the various implications that could accompany a successful suit. Would NASCAR be forced to sell its tracks? Make the teams partners in a league, like NFL and NBA owners?
If the teams end up prevailing or at least sparking meaningful change in how the Cup Series operates — making stock car racing more lucrative and attracting further investments in the process — it would somehow only add to Jordan’s sports legacy. He would not just be a transformational figure in basketball, but credited with something that would have been unthinkable even five years ago: Being the figure who helped alter the face of NASCAR forever.
GO DEEPER
Why are 23XI and Front Row suing NASCAR? Here’s what you need to know
(Top photo of Michael Jordan: Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)
She was blond and he was dark-haired; they were almost photonegatives. She looked as if she’d been in Bergman films. He was, visually, America’s Camus — wary, heavy-lidded, wreathed in cigarillo smoke, an intellectual turned out in black Levi’s and sheepskin-lined leather jackets.
Hustvedt and Auster’s double-barreled impact could prompt strange reactions. Before their wedding dinner, Hustvedt writes, a poet friend of Paul’s lifted a glass and said, “To the bride and groom, two people so good-looking I’d like to slice their faces with a razor.” Hustvedt wasn’t surprised when he slowly faded from their lives.
Auster was diagnosed with cancer in January 2023, when he was 75. Hustvedt tells the story of his illness — the chaotic E.R. visits, the hair loss, the shrinking and then metastasizing of his tumor, the wracking immunotherapy, the wheelchairs, the inability to write and the gradual loss of language — largely by reprinting the matter-of-fact group emails she sent to close friends to keep them apprised of his progress.
These sorts of missives, as anyone who has written or received them knows, are an art form of their own. When delivering good news, Hustvedt urged caution. “There is an important difference between optimism and hope,” she wrote in one such email. “The optimist’s tendency to cheer every piece of good news and predict a good outcome is understandable but creates emotional swings that, at least for those who love the patient, are unsustainable. Hope, on the other hand, is necessary for living on.”
Auster was stoic about his illness, but restless and held captive in the borderless region he termed “Cancerland.” No longer able to write fiction, near his death he began to compose a series of letters to his grandson. These letters, which are largely about family history, are printed here and are models of that form: warm, direct, undogmatic.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge is focused on unfinished novels that their authors didn’t live to see published. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS, by Yevgenia Nayberg
“You have to share many things with others … but what you remember belongs to you and you alone,” Yevgenia (Genya) Nayberg writes in the author’s note to her graphic memoir, “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters.”
The elegantly composed pages of this moving story, told largely through Nayberg’s effervescent illustrations, make clear the special place she holds in her heart for memories of her childhood in Kiev (now spelled Kyiv), Ukraine.
It is 1986, Ukraine is still part of the Soviet empire, and the entire world is anticipating Halley’s comet. Yet there are more important things in Genya’s life than the approaching comet. She is 11 years old and preparing for the entrance exam to Kiev’s National Secondary School of Art.
Inspired by her mother, who is an artist, Genya loves to draw and paint. But there is an obstacle: The family is Jewish and the art school — like many schools in the former Soviet Union — accepts only 1 percent of Jewish applicants.
When Genya was 5, her grandpa, who lived through Stalin’s Terror, told her she should “not stick out in school.” He taught her to read using Pravda, which was filled with articles about imperialism and inflation — evil spirits that haunted her dreams. (Pravda and Izvestiya — The Truth and The News — were the two major newspapers in the Soviet Union, and everyone knew the joke that accurately reflected Soviet reality: There is no news in The Truth and no truth in The News.)
In first grade, Genya’s “Honorary Teacher of the Soviet Union” — as manipulative and sinister as the government she served — demanded unconditional love from the pupils in her class, going so far as to ask them to raise their hands if they were willing to give blood to her in the event she needed a transfusion.
The same year, in military training class, the children learned the pretending game: When Genya complained that the gas mask she was supposed to practice putting on, in case of an American nuclear attack, was too big for her face, the instructor replied, “Pretend that it fits.” Both teachers and students were to pretend that everything in the country was ideal, while they waited for the promised dawn of a bright Soviet future. Nobody knew then that the nuclear fallout would come not from across the ocean but from within.
Now it is spring and Genya is bored, painting Young Pioneers with red neckties (a Soviet national scout group) over and over again at the behest of the tutor who is helping her get ready for the July exam. She consoles herself with the thought that if she is accepted she can paint whatever she likes.
On April 26 there is an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 90 kilometers from Kiev, but there is no official information about the damage or even about the accident itself. On May 1, International Workers’ Day, everyone goes outside for a parade, as usual.
On the left-hand page of a double-page spread, Kiev, in Nayberg’s exquisitely wrought, soft-hued rendering, is “blooming like a giant cream cake with white, pink and purple chestnut flowers.” On the right-hand page, as if it were part of the same scene, Nayberg has drawn a stark picture of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, stamped with the word “RADIATION” in Russian, that makes it look like a colossal tombstone. “Like every year,” young Genya wryly comments, “it is a perfect day.”
In the absence of information, Genya’s family must rely on rumors. Her mother, the driving force in the book, adds iodine to the children’s milk and takes Genya and her 3-year-old brother 1,300 kilometers away to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), in Russia, to stay with their cousins.
As Genya bikes by the city’s many World War II monuments that depict victorious soldiers, she encounters “war survivors that never quite survived,” begging for bread. In Soviet Russia, it turns out, they play the pretending game, too.
In July, to their hosts’ horror, Genya and her mother return to Kiev for the exam that cannot be missed. The three-part test — two days for composition, two days for painting and two days for drawing — is grueling.
Happily for Genya and her repeated painting of Young Pioneers cheerfully performing selfless deeds, the theme of the composition portion is “In the Morning of Our Country.” Weirdly, this could be her ticket to freedom of expression.
Nayberg’s narrator is resilient, funny and ironic, observing her surroundings with an artist’s probing eye.
Her story gracefully brings to life the Soviet world — torn down in 1991 and recently resurrected by the latest Russian dictator — provoking thorny questions about different approaches to art, the cost of trying to conform and the complexity of family ties.
“Stories let us hold on to people a little longer,” Nayberg writes at the end of this tender memoir dedicated to her artist mother. Genya’s mom, and the rest of the characters in “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters,” will stay with me for years to come.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS | By Yevgenia Nayberg | (Ages 10 and up) | Neal Porter Books | 200 pp. | Paperback, $15.99
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