In Ben Affleck’s terrific film Air, basketball talent scout Jimmy Vaccaro is risking his career on signing Michael Jordan, who’s just been drafted third overall in the 1984 NBA draft. He gambles everything on his company NIKE, not noted for its hoops shoes, winning over Jordan and his family to a radical new design.

When Jordan’s mother, played powerfully by Viola Davis, demands a percentage of every Air Jordan shoe sold, Vacarro balks, thinking his publicly held company will never approve such a radical concept. The deal looks ready to collapse, with Adidas set to move in. As they do throughout the film, viewers are yelling at the NIKE executives on screen, “Trust us! He’s going to be great! Give him what he wants!”

Being onside with history is a wonderful conceit in an era where certainty is lost and liars prosper. The audience knows what will happen if Jordan puts on the NIKE shoes and goes on to become the global sports superstar earning billions. The shoes will generate $162 M the first year in production. Jordan still receives $40 M a year for his share in the shoe. (He’s set to sell the NBA Charlotte Bobcats for $3B.)

So, of course, Jordan signs with NIKE, the shoes sell like crazy and he fulfills his destiny as a great star, winning eight NBA titles and two Olympic gold medals. Affleck (who plays NIKE founder Phil Knight) throws in a rapid slide show on what’s still to come, including the murder of Jordan’s father, James; Michael mysteriously quitting to play baseball for two years and the defining final years of his brilliant career with the Chicago Bulls.

For this reason Affleck has made a wise decision in limiting his business story to the summer of 1984. He knows that the voluminous ten-part documentary series The Jordan Rules has already trod on the dramas of his Bulls career. His straightforward underdog story allows audiences to revel in the birth of their modern culture without any of the attendant culture wars.

Like Moneyball and The Blind Side, Air delivers an uncomplicated sports business story, this time about a prominent black athlete who eschewed politics with the line, “Republicans buy running shoes, too.” It’s what they used to call an all-American story. Like Hoosiers.Thanks to then ultra-competitive Jordan the NBA went from late-night delayed broadcast nowhere in 1980 to a global brand synonymous with wealth and power.

Then Knight stepped back in 2016. By 2017, NIKE was handing out multi-millions to disgruntled NFL QB Colin Kaepernick for disrespecting the national anthem. It led the way in funnelling millions to #BLM, even as the organizers used it to buy Hollywood homes for themselves. Knight’s company will be synonymous with slave labour in China and censoring NBA figures who challenge the proximity of the league and its Chinese paymasters.

None of this is even hinted at in Air. Cause-obsessed critics missed the low-hanging fruit. Instead, Peter Bradshaw of the far-left Guardian trashed the film for "looking like the most expensive in-house corporate promo in history: shallow, parochial and obtuse”. Predictably, the critic from @NPR railed against the film’s embrace of corporate culture. Aisha Harris calls it a "craven exercise in capitalist exaltation”.

The real issue is not capitalism but the corruption of athletics by the paymasters on the Left since 1984. Thanks to the new NIKE management progressive politics ensnare nearly every positive achieved by Jordan’s triumph. Knight’s bold initiatives and unapologetic opportunism have been bled away, replaced by the DEI and ESG and climate radicalism of people who’ve succeeded him in the C suite at NIKE.

If you want to know what that accomplished watch ESPN’s three Rs for about an hour. Race. Resentment. Radical environmentalism. As a result, the second act of this script would be something far more sombre than the giddiness of wooing Jordan and his family. The LeBron James generation of young players following Jordan reject his neutrality for unabashed acceptance of the latest grievance meme. They flaunt their riches even as they toe the line with China.

On the same topic, it would be interesting to see a film about how the NHL exploited— and then squandered— its Jordan Rules moment. Parallel to the Bulls star’s ascension the NHL experienced its own Jordan in Wayne Gretzky. A once-in-a century star, Gretzky possessed all the marketable qualities of Jordan in his NHL career that began in 1979.

Using the new marketing schemes exploited by Jordan and NIKE, L.A. Kings owner Bruce McNall wooed Gretzky to Hollywood in 1988 from remote Edmonton in the most famous trade in NHL history. For a time it seemed the NHL had gotten religion in their marketing, adding Disney as an owner and exploiting the synergies of Gretzky to open up the league to the southern U.S.

But then McNall was sent to prison for fraud, and Gretzky failed to deliver a Stanley Cup to the entertainment capital of the world. He moved twice more to teams that promised a chance at a fifth Cup, but it never worked out. There was no Air Gretzky. Disney and Waste Management, the prize new owners, abandoned the league when commissioner Gary Bettman became more obsessed with labour stoppages than talking up the product to the world.

International play seemed to flourish for a time, but by the 2020s, Gary Bettman’s league was what it had been, an isolated North American operation seemingly uninterested in the global reach enjoyed by the NBA. Blanket expansion of the continent, not the world, seems their goal. Gretzky, who once denied ever betting on sports, now pimps for legalized betting at MGM.

So yes, Jordan’s shoe was a blatant marketing manipulation of the culture. Its controversial China impact is massive. But the net impact of Knight, Vaccaro and the Jordan family living out the American dream puts anything the NHL has managed in its history to shame.

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

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