Air tells the story of the trailblazing relationship between Michael Jordan and Nike by focusing on Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), a sports marketing executive in the company’s basketball division. It’s the early 1980s, and the NBA market is owned by Converse and Adidas; Nike is known – to the extent that it’s known at all – for functional running shoes. Accordingly, Vaccaro is portrayed as a misunderstood and ambitious genius unsatisfied with third place. He has a bold plan for Nike to establish itself in the basketball market: signing rookie Michael Jordan. Everyone around Sonny tells him the company can’t afford Jordan and that his plan is impossible, but the genius persists and changes the world of basketball in the process.
Despite issues with plot, Air is, for the most part, a competently made film, well-acted and directed. However, it is consistently and fundamentally undermined by its sloppy handling of race. For starters, Jordan only appears on-screen once in the entire movie, standing meekly in the background while Sonny exchanges niceties and discusses contract details before Nike’s big presentation. Jordan isn’t a part of their conversation, nor does he show any interest in it. This is Air‘s climax, an entire scene devoted to the presentation that supposedly convinced Michael Jordan to sign with Nike and changed basketball forever, and it manages to make Jordan the least important person in the room.
The scene in which we hear Jordan’s only line follows the same pattern: Vaccaro calls the Jordan home; Michael picks up, says “Hello,” and promptly gives the phone to his mother. The depiction evokes a child eager to answer the phone like a grown-up, then just as eager to pass the phone to the nearest grown-up so the grown-ups can talk about grown-up things.
Which is not to say that Sonny Vaccaro’s story shouldn’t be told. But Air is a movie that makes Michael Jordan a central character. So why does he only appear in one scene and have only one line – just one word of dialogue? The film maintains that Sonny Vaccaro is the genius behind Nike’s Michael Jordan deal: He and he alone pushes the idea of going after Jordan to the board; he risks everything to make the deal happen; and, perhaps most importantly, he is the Nike representative who establishes a deep connection with the Jordans.
This, according to Air, is one of the main reasons that Jordan signed with Nike. But it couldn’t be further from the truth. In 2015, Jordan himself told USA Today that while “Sonny likes to take the credit,” the person most responsible for Jordan’s decision was “actually George Raveling,” an assistant coach on the 1984 US Men’s Olympic Team. Said Jordan, “[Raveling] used to always try to talk to me, ‘You gotta go Nike, you gotta go Nike. You’ve got to try.’” In the same article, Nike founder Phil Knight added, “A lot of people want to take credit for signing Michael Jordan, most obviously Sonny Vaccaro…but [Sonny] wasn’t the MVP in that process.”
Raveling does appear in Air. But Marlon Wayans’ portrayal gets fewer than fifteen minutes of screentime. And even Michael Jordan’s only significance within the context of the movie is how much money he will make for Nike. This dynamic is a regular feature of Air, where, in the words of critic Carla Hay, “black basketball players are not presented as fully developed human beings but as money-making opportunities existing to boost powerful white men in the business of basketball.”
NPR’s Aisha Harris agreed, calling Air a “soulless dramatization of how a giant corporation convinced a promising NBA rookie to make its already wealthy and well-off board members, CEOs, and salespeople even wealthier and set for life.” In the world of Air, it isn’t Michael Jordan who takes the NBA from a second-tier league whose games are broadcast on tape delay and turns it into to a worldwide phenomenon – it’s Sonny Vaccaro and Phil Knight.
What does Michael Jordan himself think of his exclusion from the film? It seems at least possible that Jordan didn’t want the movie to focus on him – not because the famously humble superstar felt it only right to share the spotlight with those who helped shine it on him in the first place, but because Jordan is well-known for turning down opportunities most people would commit unspeakable acts to have. But we can only speculate: whatever the reason, Air‘s publicity doesn’t include Jordan either. When the subject has come up, it’s mostly in the context of Affleck’s choice to elide him.
Nor do Affleck’s statements mention Jordan influencing his decision one way or the other. We do know that Jordan had three demands for the film: it had to include both George Raveling, and Howard White (played by Chris Tucker, and which character was not even a part of the original script), and Viola Davis had to play his mother. Beyond that, Jordan has even less of a presence in the discussion of Air than he does in the movie itself.
Allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment: Does Air need to give Michael Jordan prominence? Isn’t it possible to tell a story about important historical figures by focusing on the people around them instead of on the figures themselves? For example, Lee Daniels’ The Butler depicts the life of Cecil Gaines (a fictional version of the real-life Eugene Allen), who served as a White House butler throughout the latter half of the 20th century. In Daniels’ film, Gaines receives the same kind of treatment that Vaccaro gets from Air. He is his film’s most important character while nearly all the presidents under whom he serves are portrayed as two-dimensional caricatures without any genuine voice or personality.
If we apply the same logic to The Butler and Air and conclude that the former film is also problematic, we then have to return to the remaining key difference: race. Every single president portrayed in The Butler has had his story told countless times: in biopics; documentaries; miniseries; plays; history books, and textbooks. No one ever needs to fight for a president’s point of view. It’s still a rarity, though, to see a mainstream Hollywood film about an African-American character, and an even rarer thing to see one that doesn’t try to change history through whitewashing.
The most egregious recent example of such a film is Green Book, which tells us that Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) is an important figure but gives the character no actual voice, agency, or identity. (Rendering Shirley without the means of expression is an even more impressive feat when you remember that the man was a musician.) Shirley is supposed to be the movie’s main character, but Green Book is actually about Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), Shirley’s driver, who winds up with all the decision-making power. It’s Lip who Green Book ensures gets the audience’s sympathy, as well as a dramatic arc; the Black Shirley, disconnected from everyday life and incapable of interacting with anyone outside the world of music, is entirely reliant upon the White Lip.
Air creates exactly the same dynamic between Michael Jordan and Sonny Vaccaro. According to Ben Affleck’s film, Jordan doesn’t become a global phenomenon because he’s the greatest basketball player of all time; it happens because he signs a shoe deal with Nike, who creates Air Jordans and make them a worldwide brand. Shortly after Air was released, Affleck said he simply “thought [Jordan] was too majestic to have anyone impersonate him” and that “ask[ing] an audience to believe that anybody other than Michael Jordan was Michael Jordan” would have “destroy[ed] the movie.”
There are a number of problems with Affleck’s reasoning. His claim that Jordan is too famous, too “majestic” to be portrayed by an actor makes little sense in light of, for example, David Oyelowo‘s Golden Globe nomination for playing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma only nine years before Air was released, or Will Smith‘s Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of the titular boxing legend in the 2001 film Ali. To be sure, Michael Jordan remains a public figure, while Selma was made nearly 50 years after MLK’s assassination and Ali almost two decades after Muhammad Ali‘s retirement, Parkinson’s diagnosis, and general retreat the public eye. However, during that time, neither MLK nor Ali lost any of their cultural relevance.
Additionally, there is even an NBA-specific example that Affleck could have drawn upon. Relative newcomers Quincy Isaiah and Solomon Hughes both made names for themselves portraying Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the HBO series Winning Time. You don’t need to be a fan of the “Showtime” Lakers of the 1970s and 80s or even of basketball in general to know who Magic and Kareem are. Isaiah captures Magic’s demeanor perfectly, displaying the same signature smile and finding the real-life player’s balance between impossible charm and intense competitiveness; Hughes manages to convey Kareem’s quiet demeanor and grand, powerful presence.
What also sets Winning Time apart is that it found a way to depict these real-life players and their larger-than-life personalities both off and on the basketball court. The series devotes time and energy to showing us why and how their style of play made them superstars: Hughes lives in the post and shoots a skyhook identical to Kareem’s, while Isaiah barrels down the floor just like Magic and shows off the same flashy passes. Its investment in fully realizing these characters could have been a template for how to depict not only the important roles these people played but who the people behind the roles really are. Instead, Air’s attempt doesn’t even graze the rim.
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