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I just decided, OK, let me just ride this pony.” Luckily for him, he found a way to embrace it all. “But after a while, I realized it was the situation every athlete wants to be in, my signature moment. “I got tired of seeing it and people saying it,” he told the New York Times in 2015. Ehlo admitted being the goat in Jordan’s heroic tale was taxing initially. Ehlo’s basket set the stage for MJ’s historic display of one-upmanship. His own potential game-winner came at Jordan’s expense as a defender one play prior.
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History neglects the fact Ehlo led Cleveland in scoring that day, with 24 points, while playing on a bum ankle. “Un-fath-om-able.” That’s the word Cleveland center Brad Daugherty used to describe Jordan’s shot to close the series. But the Cleveland bucket pushed the early Jordan narrative to new heights. Byron Russell, the one person who can empathize with Ehlo, fell victim to Jordan’s “Last Shot” in a Bulls uniform during Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals. His jumper to win North Carolina the 1982 NCAA National Championship over Georgetown lives as “the birth of Michael Jordan,” as Jordan himself put it. Jordan hit plenty of game-winning shots during his career. The outsole pattern and the black, gray, white, and red color scheme of the Air Jordan are among the most recognizable in all of footwear, largely due to Jordan’s frozen moment in mid-air. His red Bulls jersey and his sneakers have become cultural artifacts.
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The Bulls star finally shoots, scores, and celebrates with a series of fist pumps, while Ehlo and other Cavs players crumple to the floor in agony. Jordan freezes himself in time and momentarily hangs in the air, while his would-be foe’s momentum carries him away. With three seconds left on the clock, Jordan takes the inbound pass, drives left, and rises above the outstretched hands of his defender Craig Ehlo. And Money did it while wearing the “Black/Cement” Air Jordan IV, creating a defining moment for the shoe in the process.Įven the most casual sports fan knows the play. A week prior, on May 7, the Bulls star dispatched of the Cleveland Cavaliers with a game-winning, last-second shot that would go down as one of the most important footnotes of his illustrious career. The definition read, “Incapable of being fully explored or understood,” which captured everything about Michael Jordan. I remember grabbing a dictionary to look up the meaning. Legendary sports writer Jack McCallum used that word in the title of a Sports Illustrated article published in the May 15, 1989, issue, and it read foreign to 12-year-old me.