PLAYING FOR KEEPS
Michael Jordan and the World He Made
By David Halberstam
Random House 426pp $24.95

Before the Chicago Bulls won their sixth National Basketball Assn. championship, Rick Reilly, the wonderfully acerbic columnist for Sports Illustrated, wrote a piece on being up to his keister with Michael Jordan. ''Yeah, he's great, he's wonderful, and most American males would gladly undergo a sex-change operation just to have his children,'' Reilly wrote. ''As for me, I'm hoping he gets locked aboard the Mir space station for a few years.''

Now that Jordan has made his departure official, the babble about him is really ear-splitting. So certainly there are people besides Reilly who are as sick of Michael as they are of Monica. But there remains a sizable chunk of the global population who can't get enough of the man who is arguably the greatest basketball player to ever lace up a pair of sneakers and probably the most famous person on earth. That's good news for David Halberstam, whose Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made is hitting bookstore shelves with timing best described as Jordanesque. This is just a coincidence, if you believe Random House. Nevertheless, the book has some of the telltale signs of a rush job. For instance, there are a slew of annoying repetitions, and there's no index.

Still, Playing for Keeps may survive as the definitive history of this extraordinary athlete's career. Even though Jordan did not keep an unofficial agreement to give Halberstam a limited amount of direct access, the author exhaustively chronicles young Jordan's rise from Laney High School in Wilmington, N.C., where as a sophomore he failed to make the varsity team, to Game Six of the 1997-98 NBA Finals, where, with only seconds left, Michael famously sank the winning jumper.

In fact, the penultimate chapter on Game Six--and, as it turns out, the final chapter for Jordan--is a measure of Halberstam's superb reporting. Halberstam does not merely describe the ferocious contest between the Utah Jazz, led by Karl Malone, and the Bulls, led by Jordan. He muses on the unfulfilled promise of Shaquille O'Neal, whose Los Angeles Lakers lost to the Jazz in the conference finals, and other young, petulant players on the far side of a ''distinct generational divide'' within the NBA.

Some of the younger players, Halberstam writes, ''seemed not to understand the difference between being a rock star and being a basketball player and believed they were both. O'Neal, formidably talented, touted as a potential heir to Michael Jordan, but as yet an incomplete player, had arrived in the league as a full-service conglomerate: He could sing and did; he could act in movies and did; he could sell products and did; and perhaps he might also play basketball.''

The chapter on Game Six is also written through the eyes of people such as Harvest Leroy Smith, a high school pal who made the team when Michael didn't; Dean Smith, the coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who helped mold Jordan; and Jerry Krause, the principal deputy to Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf. Krause's savoir faire is evident in his reported comment after the game: ''Jerry [Reinsdorf] and I have done it [won the championship] six times.''

Playing for Keeps is really four books, and the voices reflect that. One book is about the rise of a superstar. Another is about the commercialization of sports, the NBA in particular. A third is about all the people, many interesting in their own right--such as Coach Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen, and Spike Lee--who were present at the creation of the world Jordan helped build. And the fourth is about the Bulls' championship season in 1997-98.

But the year that is most important to the book and to basketball is 1984. That year, Halberstam tells us, ABC Inc. bought ESPN and brought ''its high-powered television skills [to]...this odd little network'' that broadcast NBA games. That year, a lawyer named David Stern, who grew up working behind the counter of his father's deli, not far from Madison Square Garden, became commissioner of the NBA. And that year, Michael Jordan, with the blessing of Coach Smith, left North Carolina after his junior year to play for the Bulls.

From then on, the world of sports and sports marketing would never be the same. And after 1992, when Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, and the rest of the Dream Team wowed the world at the Barcelona Olympics, it seemed as though the NBA and its stars could only fly higher and higher. No TV contract seemed too improbable, no salary too lavish, no endorsement deal too eye-popping.

Yet, despite the base of corporate support that Stern has constructed, Halberstam suggests that the league has grown too big, too fast. ''Its economics had changed so dramatically that it was top-heavy and lacked a solid foundation: It was a wonderful sport for producing five or six good and sometimes great teams at playoff time, but it was built on stilts, its underpinnings shakier than those of the other two big-time sports.'' Now, with Jordan gone, the NBA entertainment machine will be tested as never before. And reading Playing for Keeps, you're left wondering how well it will fare without Michael.

BY CIRO SCOTTI

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