How strange that the most recognizable image of one of our most recognizable people bears so little resemblance to his reality.
You’ve seen it. A silhouette. The legs splayed in opposite directions. A torso rising upwards out of them. An arm extending out of it, not quite vertical. At the end of that arm, a ball. The graphic icon of Michael Jordan, adorning his shoes and his sweatsuits and anything else with enough room for a logo, a signal to the world that the things you have belong mostly to you but also partly to him. The man made brand. The Jumpman.
The inverted-Y stance of Jordan’s logo was captured in a staged photo shoot in 1985. It was a tweaked version of a pose another photographer had taken the year before when Jordan was going to the Olympics, the man leaping and performing a ballet dancer’s grand jeté while reaching as if to dunk a ball. It took a few years for the photo to be turned into a silhouette, but a copy of the picture was attached to each pair of the original Air Jordans.
It is obvious in either photo that Jordan is not going to make it to the rim, an outcome that feels less likely than the alternative for His Airness. None of the most famous leaps of his career bear any resemblance to it: the coiled strike of the free-throw line take-off from the 1987 Dunk Contest; the impossible conversion of a vertical to horizontal trajectory during the hand-switching lay-up against the Lakers in the 1991 Finals; the dunk off Scottie Pippen’s missed free-throw against the Blazers in 1992, where he looks for all the world like he’s leaping out of a plane without a parachute. This fact was important. When the original photographer sued Nike in 2015, alleging copyright infringement and seeking a portion of the Jordan Brand’s substantial profits, his petition read in part, “The pose, while conceived to make it appear that Mr. Jordan was in the process of a dunk, was not reflective of Mr. Jordan’s natural jump or dunking style.”
It may not look like Jordan as experienced on the court, but what’s uncanny is the logo’s resemblance to the decade’s other most-famous jumper. Nintendo’s hero and mascot Mario was first introduced to the world with the name Jumpman in Donkey Kong in 1981. He adopted the complete pose—with the arm held high—in 1983’s Mario Bros., which then became ubiquitous with the release of Super Mario Bros. in 1985, the same year Jordan posed for the Jumpman photo.
The pose may mean something different for each of them. figure. What the two share is an aesthetic perfection of leaping, an ideal ratio of height and distance. Jordan jumps like no one else, not in an arc but in a trapezoid, reaching the apex quickly and then appearing to stay there. This quality perhaps more than anything is what led to his rise to global superstardom. Before he was a consummate winner, before he was a competitive killer, this is what marked him as special: He went up and he did not come down at the rate everyone else did. To see it was—and still is—thrilling, like seeing a whale breach the surface of the ocean.
Jumping in a Mario game allows the player to approach, ever so slightly, the ideal demonstrated by Jordan in the real world. The two jumps may be motivated by different factors—survival in a hostile, pit-filled kingdom for Mario; dominance in an ecosystem of very tall men for Jordan—but both of their techniques are marked by a remarkable degree of control retained while airborne. Jordan’s feline body control allowed him to contort himself at Fosbury Flop-type angles in the air and still land on his feet, just as the invisible thumb of the player can nudge Mario forward or back to finetune the landing.
All the obstacles and enemies in the Mario franchise’s long history would mean nothing if its core jumping action didn’t feel so good, like a drop of frisson spritzing the brain. The feel of the physical button under the thumb; the twang of the unmistakable disco-spring sound effect; the way Mario, like Mike, leaves the ground and keeps going, with the arc flattening rather than peaking.
The joy in both jumps can be found in that hitch at the top, the instant where the figures look as though they should start going down but instead keep going sideways. Our brains know how things are supposed to fall. We do the mental math on the rate of descent even if we can’t remember the specifics of 9.8 meters per second squared. And so what it can feel like—even in the game, where the rules could be whatever the team at Nintendo wanted them to be—is less that someone is hovering and more that we are watching something moving at the wrong speed. That he is up there for so long in defiance not of space but of time. That we who watch, or press the button to make it happen, have been able to encounter more than we otherwise ought to in that period of time. It feels like an overload of experience, which is where the wonder comes from. The Jumpman is less a representation of a body moving through space than it is of one stuck in time, pinned to that point at the apex when everything still seems possible.
