Michael Jordon tries his hand at MotoGP
Michael Jordon is, some people would say, the greatest sport person of all time. He is up there with greats like Muhammad Ali and Pele. He was not just a phenomenal basketball player when he played with the Chicago Bulls but some say he was the greatest basketball player ever. His ability to soar through the air and wow the fans with his skills with the ball was second to none. Watching him play basketball was like watching an artist at work; he had an innate skill and he outplayed all of his rivals by a wide margin.
Then he semi-retired and tried his hand at baseball. It seems to be that he thought that he was so good at basketball that he will probably be just as good at some other sport. Since he was very fond of baseball, he decided to give it a shot. He ended up playing in the minor leagues and it didn’t do too well for him because his baseball career was almost as short lived as his retirement. He promptly hung up his baseball uniform and went back to playing basketball. There were issues with his beloved jersey number but that too was eventually sorted out. All of his fans breathed a sigh of relief and hoped he would stay with basketball until he retired for good.
Soon the great basketball player retired from basketball for good and decided to lay low and spend some time with his family. But wait everything was not cool in the land of Air Jordan. An article surfaced a few years ago saying that Jordan was trying to ride a MotoGP motorcycle. Groans all around ensued because people thought that he had gone back to try his hand at another sport. The article said, “The American superstar – who is recognised in the US as one of the greatest sporting heroes of all time – had a first taste of MotoGP at last season's finale in Valencia, where he had the opportunity to ride a Ducati Desmosedici,” (http://www.motogp.com/en/news/2005/Michael+Jordan+partakes+in+historic+MotoGP+weekend). Jordan probably had a few problems when he tried to ride a Ducati, first of all he is too tall to ride a motorcycle competitively and he will need years of training to be able to ride a bike at any sort of competitive speed.
Well everything turned out all right because it turned out that Jordan owns a MotoGP racing team and he was trying out a bike ride for fun, phew! It seems that his love for the sport of motorcycle racing is intense but not to the level of trying to compete in it for himself. It is a good sign that he tried riding a MotoGP bike a few years ago and decided to buy a team this time instead of trying to become a professional motorcycle racer. It seems to be that athletes who retire from their sport cannot stay down for too long and they need to get back into the action as soon as they possibly can. A lot of professional athletes have tried their hand at a second sporting career and most have failed but some have gone onto renewed success. The fact about sports is that athletes have to retire at a pretty young age; they cannot go on playing until they are in there 60’s when most people retire. A lot of athletes retire in their mid thirties and only a few make it to their forties. The Sri Lankan cricketer Sanath Jayasuriya is 40 years old and he is still playing first class cricket. How he maintains his fitness levels at 40 is anyone’s guess but he is championing through it.
Due to the fact that sports stars are so young when they do retire, they seem to get restless and need to do something else in their lives; they could go the George Foreman route and reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs who sell barbeque grills for a living. We can all hope that aging athletes don’t try to stage a comeback in the sport that gave them so much fame, fortune and a huge fan base and then go ahead and ruin that fame and fortune that took so long to build up in the first place. A good case in point here is the great F1 driver Michael Schumacher, who many say should have stayed retired. Well anyway at least the great Michael Jordan is staying retired and concentrating on spending his money and promoting his MotoGP team without actually getting in the driver’s seat this time.
Tags: