Shouts from a Third Act

Beyond great is a subjective term, although there’s no denying that Michael Jordan remains one of the greatest professional basketball players of all time, if not the greatest player. What’s beyond great about this feature film is watching how MJ and Nike got together—against all the odds. It’s the story of a young athlete’s exceptional but nascent talent, the business of sports, people taking chances, a mother’s vision, and the power of a sneaker design.

In 1984, when the film opens, Nike has been a public company for four years. Founder Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) started it back in 1964 with his former track coach at the University of Oregon, and Phil is still running the show. Going public has made Phil a rich man (net worth north of $100 million) but now he has a different set of headaches.

Nike is best known for its running shoes; the basketball division is much smaller and not particularly profitable. Most NBA teams wear Converse sneakers. Adidas, too, has a big share of the market, with Nike clocking in at a distant third. Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) is a salesman in the basketball division. The NBA draft has just ended, and Sonny’s job—along with the other salesmen—is to sign one of these athletes to an endorsement deal. They don’t have a big budget, and Sonny’s boss Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) wants to divvy it up among three athletes. Sonny decides he wants to sign Michael Jordan, the former UNC player who won a national championship his freshman year. Pretty much everyone at Nike thinks Sonny is out of his mind:

1. MJ is almost certainly going to sign with Adidas. He loves and wears their sneakers. His UNC team wore Converse, but he always practiced in Adidas.
2. Michael was a third-round draft pick (not a first or even a second) who’s jut signed with the Chicago Bulls; some people at Nike make the point MJ didn’t even make his high school varisty team as a sophomore, and they can point to a whole list of college stars whose stars didn’t burn bright as NBA players.
3. MJ’s agent tells Sonny that MJ has NO interest in even talking to Nike. He doesn’t like their shoes, and he’s got meetings set up with Adidas and Converse, the only two companies he’s considering. Plus Nike can’t afford Michael. It would take their entire budget to sign him to an endorsement deal. But Sonny won’t give up. He’s willing to risk his job to go for it. Phil isn’t on board, and Sonny hasn’t even figured out a way to talk to Michael. Until Nike colleague and former basketball player Howard White (Chris Tucker) tells him, “The Mamas run things in black families,” and Sonny travels to Wilmington, N.C., to talk to MJ’s parents in person. There he meets Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis, absolutely superb), who is clearly a force in MJ’s life and believes in his talent. She agrees to give Nike a chance–provided she isn’t completely sold on what Converse and Adidas have to say.

In the end, the Nike basketball sneaker—christened Air Jordan—is key. So is the speech Sonny gives to MJ and his parents about talent and destiny and allowing everyday people who buy Air Jordans to participate in the dream. As impassioned as the speech is, Deloris wants more. She thinks her son deserves a percentage of each Air Jordan sold.
Not only was this a good deal for Michael, it ended up being a boon to Nike’s business. In 1985, first-year sales of the Air Jordan were $126 million—Nike was expecting no more than $3 million. Today the Air Jordan line does about $4 billion in sales annually. It’s believed that MJ’s passive annual income from the deal is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Nike and Phil Knight, who continued to hold a major stake in the public company, became much richer. It enabled Phil, who retired from Nike in 2016, to donate $2 billion to various charities and worthy causes. Michael Jordan has inspired countless boys and girls and other athletes. And who’s to say that his percentage deal with Nike didn’t help inspire him to become beyond great.

Not only is AIR a good sports story, it’s a good business story. Maybe a beyond great story.

If you liked or loved this year’s Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, the novel Interior Chinatown is its own kind of wonderful. It won a National Book Award back in 2021 and predates the movie, but reading it now made me appreciate the film—and rejoice at its many awards—all the more. Whereas Evelyn Wang (Everything…) is an overworked middle-aged wife and mother running a laundry business being audited by the I.R.S., Willis Wu (Interior Chinatown) is a young bit-part actor in a police procedural, working his way up from “Generic Asian Man” to what he believes is the ultimate role for somebody like him—“Kung Fu Guy.” The two plots are very different, particularly given Evelyn’s discovery that she can experience different lives simultaneously in a multiverse threatened by her estranged daughter. But what the movie and novel have in common is the Asian immigrant experience. It isn’t pretty, but it’s not without hope.

Interior Chinatown doesn’t read like other novels. It reads like a screenplay for a TV show, with added commentary by Willis Wu. Willis is the younger son of immigrant parents who both grew up poor in Taiwan and dreamed of better lives in the U.S. (Older son, with all the potential, is missing in action, but turns up as a future plot point.)

The main setting for the cop show “Black and White” is The Golden Palace restaurant, in Chinatown. The show stars a hunky black detective, Mike Turner, and his pretty white partner, Sarah Green. When we first meet Willis, he’s acting the role of “Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy.” At night he retires to his SRO (Single Room Only) above the restaurant, which is where the restaurant workers who often double as bit-part actors also live. Willis routinely checks on his parents, who live on the second floor, before climbing up to his own room on eight. His father’s acting path included parts like “Guy in a Soiled T-Shirt” and “Egg Roll Cook,” but he briefly rose to the role of “Sifu, the Mysterious Kung Fu Master” before his inevitable downfall to “Old Asian Man.” His beautiful mother now plays “Old Asian Woman,” but she was once “Restaurant Hostess” and “Girl with the Almond Eyes.” Willis has fond memories of the time spent with his mom when he was a kid. His mantra was “Someday I’m going to be Bruce Lee.” One day, after he accidentally injures his mother practicing his moves, she doesn’t get angry. She says, “Don’t be Kung Fu Guy. Be more.”

And somehow, he does it. He flubs a line, forgets to speak with a Chinese accent, and suddenly he’s “Special Guest Star,” and then he’s ad-libbing lines and driving the plot of the show in a new direction. He meets a beautiful young actress on the show, who looks white but is one-quarter Taiwanese. He can’t believe it, but she seems to like him. Everywhere she goes, “people think I’m one of them,” she tells him. “They want to claim me for their tribe. . .I can be objectified by men of all races.” They marry, then she gets her own show and moves to the suburbs with their daughter, but he stays behind—temporarily he says, believing he’s so very close to landing the part of “Kung Fu Guy.”

By the end of the novel—or screenplay—the author Charles Yu has pulled off what seemed impossible at the outset. With an economy of words, he’s given us a story that’s fun as well as moving, scathing, informative and hopeful.

In her acceptance speech for Best Actress, Michelle Yeong, the star of Everything Everywhere All at Once, said, “For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities.” Ms. Yeong, now 60, grew up in Malaysia and rose to fame doing action parts in Hong Kong films in the 1990s. She did her own stunts as the Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies and in the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. She was 26 when she arrived in Hollywood, and she’s said people were surprised she could speak English. “You’re a minority,” she kept hearing, which surprised her. She’d grown up in Malaysia, a multi-racial society.

Charles Yu wrote a novel about someone who’s marginalized who makes his own story. The two Oscar-winning directors who also wrote the script for Everything, Daniel Kwan (Chinese) and Daniel Scheinert (American Caucasian), wrote the kind of story they wanted to tell. They initially wanted Jackie Chan for the lead, but he turned them down. Michelle Yeong was their next choice. No doubt this hard-working actress is feeling even better about her own story right now. And we, the grateful audience, get to sit back, enjoy, and applaud.