OK, first, apologies go out to Scottie Pippen, Basketball Hall of Famer and one of the few enshrined who could truly be described as underrated. He wore No. 33 with distinction and it was raised with good cause to the rafters of the United Center. Likewise, and as sincerely, to Bob “Butterbean” Love and Jerry Sloan, whose Nos. 10 and 4 jerseys hang alongside Pippen’s. Neither is any offence intended for Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah or any others on the current roster. Respect is richly earned by any man who has stuck his head and arms through the openings in the team’s jersey going back to 1966, when the NBA decided it would be a good idea to once again have a team in the Second City even though its predecessor, the Stags, had folded their tent 16 years before.
As a preface, this might seem overlong but only because the crux is brief and to the point.
When we speak of the Chicago Bulls uniform we’re talking about the No. 23 jersey, the one worn in the ’80s and ’90s by Michael Jordan and seemingly every aspiring baller on every playground around the world. We’re talking about the jersey in the multitude of images of his day. Images of the nonpareil slashing to the hoop and throwing it down with tongue flapping. Images that were pinned to bedroom walls at all imaginable latitudes and longitudes. Jordan was the best player and coincidentally the Bulls the best team when the NBA’s reach finally extended worldwide. He was both man and brand, probably more the latter.
By the time Jordan arrived on the scene, the Bulls had already dispensed with a couple of old-school jersey designs that featured “Chicago” in script across the chest and numbers tucked away over the left rib cage. The colour scheme held, though: white as the snow that piles up outside the United Center, black as the mood of a penned-up bull at a rodeo and red as a matador’s cape. The lettering is plain but bold—too bold in the eyeballs of umpteen defenders posterized by Jordan as he soared over them, and not quite bold enough for Bryon Russell, the Utah Jazz defender Jordan artfully pushed off of when he sank his last basket as a Bull, a jumper that clinched his and the franchise’s sixth and last title in ’98.
As a man, Jordan was hard to like; as a player, in that No. 23 jersey, he was impossible to deny. He elevated it. The threads across his back were, like his teammates, just along for the ride.