Life's A Dance, You Learn As You Go

May 02, 1994|By Bob Greene.

GREENVILLE, S.C. — If you want to, you can pick out small details to try to describe what this feels like.

There's the BC Headache Powder sign in the baseball park, blue lettering on a white background, right next to the yellow-and-blue Yoo-Hoo soft drink sign, telling you that this is the minor leagues before a player even walks onto the field.

There's the country music playing from the park's loudspeaker system, welcoming the customers from the surrounding counties as they arrive for the night's game: "Life's a dance, you learn as you go. . . . "

There's the local high school girl whose job, every night of the season, is to take a blue grease pen and fill in the starting lineups for both teams on an erasable board near the ticket window. She has finished all the names of the hometown Greenville Braves, and now she is working on the lineup for the visiting team. She writes the batting order, last names only: Brady, the second baseman; Coughlin, the center-fielder; Tedder, the designated hitter. . . .

When she gets to the seventh spot, she writes "Jordan," and in the dying sunlight she turns around, startled, to find 40 people watching and applauding. Just at the sight of her writing a name.

"I feel a little bit like a fish," Michael Jordan said. "Like I'm in an aquarium. It's OK. This is my choice."

So any illusions he may have been harboring that by coming down to the Double-A Southern League for the summer, he could make himself relatively invisible. . . .

"No," he said. "There is no possible way for me to be invisible."

Before leaving spring training, Jordan had said: "Look, I've lived high on the hog for a long time. I'm perfectly capable of living not high on the hog." When many were saying he would be embarrassed by the apparent indignity-a world champion sent to the minors-he said: "Embarrassed? By what? Don't they understand-this is going to be one fun summer."

And it seems to be coming true. Not that it's all laughter; I met up with him late one afternoon here after he had just worked out with batting instructor Mike Barnett and outfield coach Dallas Williams, with the humidity soaring and the temperatures heading toward 90. "This is killing me," Jordan said, the sweat pouring off him and soaking every inch of his clothes.

But the one fun summer part? "Yep," he said. "I made the right choice. It's up to you to decide what you ought to do with the time you have in your life."

There are moments every night that feel like they ought to be pressed into a scrapbook. One in particular:

Greenville Municipal Stadium had been sold out weeks in advance. Right around 5 p.m., though-2 hours and 15 minutes before game time-the skies turned dark, then black. There were cracks of lightning over the center-field fence, and the rain pounded against the stadium, hard and cold in the still-warm air.

And the people came anyway. First by the dozens, then by the hundreds, then by the thousands, they filled the stadium in the driving rain. Parents and children, teenagers in groups, older men and women-they went to their seats and they sat in the downpour. The teams were inside.

As the storm continued, the crowd grew instead of diminished. What a sight-the thousands on a South Carolina evening, sitting in the pouring rain. The game was delayed, then delayed again, and the people didn't leave. And then, with the stadium lights on, after 8 o'clock in full nighttime-some had been sitting in the rain for three hours-the Birmingham team began to appear from the visitors' clubhouse behind left field. The players rounded a corner, one by one, and you could hear the sound before you saw anything.

The people in the left-field seats had caught sight of him first. The noise spread throughout the little ballpark, there was still a drizzle visible through the lights from the towers, and here came Jordan, a minor leaguer, carrying three bats, walking down the third-base path toward the dugout. The sound was amazing, it was the kind of sound you heard so often in Chicago Stadium, but it was in South Carolina, with a forest in back of the outfield fence, and it only grew louder with each passing second. The people in the seats were drenched, and you could see that some of them were crying, too, and who would have believed this? Who would have guessed? One fun summer, and it's only May.