BASKETBALL/Michael Jordan retires: Matthew Engel looks at the career of Michael Jordan, the outstanding player of his generation, who is retiring for the third and final time tonight

The last home game of a dead season was already won and lost, so with almost two minutes left the old man trudged off the court and allowed himself to be substituted. At that moment, the cheering started. It went on, and on, and on. The game resumed but the rest of it was lost amid the tumult for the man with the towel on the bench.

That was Washington on Monday night. But tonight, at some point, the cheering really will fade away, forever. After one last otherwise meaningless fixture - the Philadelphia 76ers against the Washington Wizards - Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player who ever lived, will retire for the third and final time.

The first time he gave up was to make a short, unconvincing but very touching attempt to make it as a professional baseball player. The second retirement came in 1998 after he had led the Chicago Bulls to the NBA championship for the sixth time, having won the Most Valuable Player awards for the finals all six times.

From the point of view of story line, that should have been it. On the one hand Jordan is the greatest brand name any sport has ever seen, and packing in then would have protected his reputation. But Jordan is also a human, and a fidgety, obsessive one at that. He really does love playing basketball. Having left the Bulls and bought a slice of the unsuccessful Washington franchise, he decided, as the Wizards' vice-president of basketball operations, that the best signing he could make in 2001 was Michael Jordan.

So for two far-fetched, fascinating and frustrating seasons Jordan has been battling - at times it seemed alone - to get the Wizards into the end-of-season play-offs. Sisyphus had a comparatively cushy number. In strict playing terms his comeback has been a failure: the Wizards failed to make the play-offs either year, although half the teams in the league win a place. And after Monday's cheers there was a nasty scene backstage when some of the team's obvious inner tensions spilled over into recriminations. The Wizards' homage to Jordan was a 93-79 defeat.

Artistically, there are two opinions about Jordan's return. Some think he has tarnished his legacy by playing as a gifted mortal rather than an immortal genius; this view is not much held around Washington, where people have just loved having him around. Commercially, it has been a rip-roaring success: there has not been an unsold seat in Washington for two years.

Five years ago, there was a piece in Fortune magazine by Roy S Johnson, who tried to measure Jordan's effect on the global economy, including everything from sales of tickets to those of shoes, drinks and cereals. Johnson reckoned the figure was around $10 billion, but has now updated that to $13 bn. "The ripples from Jordan's presence, by all indications, show little sign of falling flat any time soon," he wrote, "in large part because his comeback allowed another generation of fans, many of whom had never seen him play in person, to witness a glimpse of the legend at work."

It is very American to try to quantify the unquantifiable: Jordan's place in the sporting pantheon will be on the top-most level, where figures cease to have any meaning. Like Babe Ruth, Don Bradman, Muhammad Ali, Joe Davis and maybe Pele and Tiger Woods, he has both transformed and transcended his own sport.

What made him unique was that he combined three entirely separated social elements, two of which go way beyond sport. Firstly, of course, he was an utterly brilliant player. Three centuries after Newton was hit by the apple, Jordan abandoned gravity and took wing with an extra aerial kick that produced the mysterious phenomenon of "hang time".

But that was only the beginning. "He was probably the only American athlete who was always better than his hype," said Jack McCallum, the senior basketball writer for Sports Illustrated. "He did things in the air that no player had ever done, and he did it all with an incandescent smile.

"Then as he grew older, and couldn't do all the aerobatic bit, he changed his game. He became the best jump-shooter in the league. He became the best defensive player. And pound for pound he became the strongest player in the league."

Jordan made his debut in 1984, the year a young lawyer called David Stern became the NBA commissioner, and saw a sport ripe for transformation. In 1979 Stern, as a junior employee, had negotiated basketball's first cable TV contract - for $500,000. The figure now is $223 million.

Everyone rose together on Jordan's athletic body: the sport, Stern, the ESPN sports channel and, the once-unglamorous footwear company, Nike, that signed Jordan up.

Nike's ad agency stuck him together with a young film-maker called Spike Lee to make commercials that distilled the essence of urban lifestyle. That miracle is still defying commercial gravity. Jordan-branded Nike products are expected to bring in $320 million this financial year, a rise of 40 per cent.

It was not just shoe culture that was ripe for exploitation; it was black culture. The US had had black sporting heroes before, but Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, the pioneering baseball player, were palpably second-class citizens, successful in spite of their race.

Then there was Ali. "But Ali," says McCallum, "was a revolutionary. As many people hated him as liked him. Jordan never said anything controversial. He was just this smiling athlete who was smart and fair-minded and not arrogant. He was the first athlete we were truly colour-blind about."

The consequences were perhaps even more staggering than most people have yet realised. In a remarkable 1999 book, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism, Walter LaFeber threw together the names Jordan and Osama bin Laden and named Jordan as the innocent chief representative of an American "soft power" that he saw as both dominating and antagonising the rest of the world.

Do we blame Jordan for September 11th? That might be pushing it. But tonight, when he makes his last elegant pass and makes his last elegant bow of the head, we should be aware that here is a man whose impact on the world has almost certainly gone beyond that of any other sportsman.

Guardian Service