YOUNG GUNS

In addition, it was explained that nobody notified the police that he was missing, because James Jordan was always running off for days at a time without telling anyone where he was.

The only columnist who came up with a piece indicating that Camelot still existed for Michael Jordan was Bob Greene, who wrote the book Hang Time: Days and Dreams With Michael Jordan, a series of adulatory interviews with Jordan. Greene wrote a reminiscence last Sunday.

"If you're lucky," Greene recalled Jordan saying to him, "you grow up in a house where you can learn what kind of person you should be from your parents. And on that count, I was very lucky. It may have been the luckiest thing that ever happened to me."
It is instructive to learn who Jordan considers to be his friends in the media. The only media person invited to the funeral was Ahmad Rashad, the television sportscaster.

It's a strange story. Last Sunday, at the height of it all, that Nike commercial for Jordan ran again. The one in which he's all alone in the gym and he says: "What if I were just a basketball player?"

But he isn't just a basketball player. He's a superstar. And these are the things that go with the package.

We will be caught up in this story forever. It will never go away, and we don't know what effect it will have on Jordan.

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner once wrote. "It's not even past.