Scoop Jackson Thinks Michael Jordan Should Go to Hall of Fame Alone

I won't lie; I'm not a Scoop Jackson fan. I don't read his stuff very often, because I don't agree with most of what he has to say. Comparing Len Bias to Jesus is just one of the stupid things he has put in print.

However, I read his recent piece about how Michael Jordan should be given his own day in the Hall of Fame, and I think he has set the bar low, even for himself.

Part of me thinks that ESPN likes him to spew this ignorance, just to read the mail that comes in; it proves that people are reading and it gets them involved. But you'd think a company that seems so high on its own journalistic integrity wouldn't stoop to that.

Let's breakdown this piece of tripe, and some of the ramifications that it has:

That old saying, "No one remembers who comes in second"? Well, no one remembers anything anyone else did if he or she played or coached during the Era of Jordan.

How can anybody that knows anything about basketball be allowed to write that? Sure, we all know Jordan was great, and no one will ever have the impact on basketball that he did.

But to go so far as to say no one remembers anything during the "Era of Jordan"?

No one remembers John Stockton, Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, or any of the other superstars of that era? Ridiculous.

Which is why the Hall of Fame—if it really cares about players and being true to transcendence of the game—should induct Jordan alone. Solo. By himself. With no one else. That would be the fairest thing to do, for all involved.

Yeah, that's what a team sport like basketball needs. More emphasis on the individual.

Make David Robinson, John Stockton, Don Nelson and Cynthia Cooper wait a year. Because Scoop says so.

Never mind that each of those people made their own impact on the game. Common sense goes out the window when you're dealing with stupidity like this.

What happens if Jordan came up for the Hall of Fame in 2006? Would we make Barkley, Joe Dumars, and Dominique Wilkins wait a year?

No one wants to take into total consideration what Jordan has done and what he means to the game.

Are you kidding me? Everyone knows what Jordan did for the game. That's why every player who is, or will be, great will forever be compared to MJ.

LeBron, Kobe, D-Wade. Scouts, writers, pundits are always on the lookout for the next MJ. Then the response comes, "There will not be another MJ."

Because there won't.

Hell, the pressure of becoming the next MJ has derailed some promising careers with nothing more than hype. Jerry Stackhouse. Vince Carter. Any athletic swingman that comes out of UNC will be compared with Jordan.

The only reason Tim Duncan and Shaq have been immune to all of this is because they play a completely different game than Jordan.

Basketball is the one sport where an individual rising above a team rubs people the wrong way.

Baseball? It's purely a one-on-one match-up between pitcher and catcher.

Football? Someone like Tom Brady or Steve Smith can be the individual that is associated with a team, and they're considered superstars for it.

But in basketball, we don't like to see selfish players. We don't like it when Kobe shoots 25 times and dishes out three assists, unless he scores 81 points.

Kobe finally started getting his due from the "critics" the last few years, because he began to trust his teammates, and sacrifice his own stats for wins. And it got him back to the Finals; it might very well do the same thing this season.

Jason Kidd, Steve Nash, Chris Paul, even LeBron are thought of as great teammates, because they get their teams involved.

Interestingly enough, basketball is the one sport where the individual can take over a game, and win it as close to single-handedly as possible.

Wade did it in 2006. Bron Bron did it in 2007. And that's what Jordan did when he played. He took over games, and made the plays—over, and over, and over again.

But should he have gotten a ring by himself? No, because he had a team to help him. It can't be argued that Jordan is the one chiefly responsible for winning those titles, but it's a team sport.

No player is above a team, because no player can win a five-on-one game.

For someone who is such a "scholar" of basketball, it really irks me that Scoop Jackson either doesn't know this, or is pretending not to know this.

Whatever else Jordan did, he doesn't deserve to be placed above the sport itself. His accomplishments speak for themselves: the six rings, the six Finals MVPs, the five regular season MVPs, the 14 All-Star Games, the 10 All-NBA first teams, and the title of "The Greatest Basketball Player to Have Ever Lived."

That's Jordan's reward. And it's plenty.