Page 87 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

court circle, in the bleachers, trading jokes but his pops wasn’t so keen. “He was hesi-
and chopping it up in between. Once they’re
done with the camera, the team goads him in-
to shooting a jumper. He declines at first—
something about his clothes and not having
played in a while. But he succumbs with just a
bit of pressure. He doffs his jacket and walks
back onto the court, ball in hand. You can see
where the tailor had to tack his pants to fit
his slim waist.
See arms that look like boulders in the
sleeves of his turtleneck. See shoulders the
size of small mountains. And this is the dude
who had to take time off from serious train-
ing to film Just Mercy so he could look like
a regular Homo sapiens and not a demigod
just bounding off the set of Black Panther. (As
his trainer, Corey Calliet, says, “I had to let
his body get back to its natural form of basic
needs. I had to have him eat a lot of protein
and live a normal life.”)
Jordan stops near the top of the circle and
shoots, elbow tucked with nice extension. He
misses, and the squad soundtracks the miss
with raucous onomatopoeia. He takes an-
other shot and misses that, too. He takes an-
JOSEPHINE BAKER, SIDNEY POITIER, OSSIE DAVIS, RUBY DEE—JORDAN IS
JOINING A STORIED HISTORY OF BLACK ACTORS WHO’VE
ALSO BEEN CHAMPIONS OF CIVIL RIGHTS, WHICH IS TO SAY JUSTICE.
other and another, misses both. Then a man
with a salt-and-pepper beard and polo shirt
in school colors strolls onto the court, whis-
pers something in Jordan’s ear, and stands
by his side. Jordan bends his knees a bit and
sinks his next shot. The squad applauds. The
jump-shot whisperer is Jordan’s old coach,
Mr. Kennis Fairfax. Coach Fairfax.
At just thirty-two, Jordan is a young OG
as far as Hollywood goes. He was born in
Santa Ana, California, the middle child of
three kids, but raised in Newark by his par-
ents, Donna Davis Jordan and Michael A.
Jordan. His mother is a visual artist and for-
mer teacher, and his pops, a Marine and for-
mer affiliate of the Black Panthers, runs a
food bank. “My artistic side, my emotional
side, my intuition, being an empath—I get
that from her,” Jordan says. “My discipline,
my work ethic—I get that from my dad. So
between the two of them, I got the right
ingredients.”
His career began when his mother was at
a doctor’s appointment and the reception-
ist encouraged her to shuttle him to an au-
dition. Jordan started landing local model-
ing gigs posthaste, which pleased his mom,
tory of the Middle Passage, were told Africa
tant on the whole entertainment thing when
I was younger,” says Jordan. “He used to say,
‘Bakari, you have to be serious about some-
thing. What are you serious about?’”
That skepticism endured until Jordan’s
pops saw him on the set of Cosby, his first act- 1619 tattooed inside his lip instead of a glow-
ing role. “He saw the respect I had from the
crew, and I think that’s kind of what clicked,
and he was like, Okay,” Jordan says.
In Fruitvale Station, Jordan took the role
of Oscar Grant, a black man killed by a tran-
sit cop in Oakland. Grant is a returning cit-
izen with a young daughter and a girlfriend
who wants better for him. He’s been fired
from his job and has been selling weed to
provide for his family despite the chances
of it landing him back in prison. Grant’s cir-
cumstances almost echoed the crucible of
my own early twenties—as well as no few
of my peers’—a period during which my
time behind the walls seemed to consign
me to dreaming no more than was practical
and to years, if not a lifetime, of struggling.
That director was Ryan Coogler, then all
of twenty-six years old. “The working con-
ditions for Fruitvale were really intense,”
says Coogler. “Through the intensity of the
work, of the subject matter, and the limited
resources that we had, we kind of forged a
working rhythm and friendship as well.”
The pair reunited for Creed, the Rocky-
franchise spin-off that turned MBJ into a sex
symbol, two years later, in 2015, and again
for Black Panther, the 2018 film that, with its
billion-plus box-office gross and Oscar nom-
ination for Best Picture, launched Jordan in-
to the global-star stratosphere.
A superhero-franchise flick, yes, but Black
Panther was also cultural critique, one that
highlighted, among other things, the history
of colonization, the plight of blacks in the
Other America, and the sometimes fraught
relationship between American-born blacks
and our African kin. As Black Panther’s nem-
esis Killmonger, Jordan again played a char-
acter whose experiences reflected my own—
and those of many I knew well—boys who
felt orphaned, who seethed through their
teens, some of whom, as young men, bought
straps and invited reasons to use them or else
carried them on their person as a means to
survive. Some of us learned the wicked his-
was our homeland, but what did that mean
when we—and four hundred years of fore-
bears—had also been conditioned into dis-
connectedness from the diaspora? Shoot,
Killmonger might as well have had the year
ing Vibranium symbol.
For damn near twenty years now, Jordan
has been making the experiences of Ameri-
can black men legible to the wide world. And
I’d argue that doing so is an essential part of
what keeps his feet planted on terra firma,
even when he’s now a Hollywood elite.
Coach Fairfax, who remains close to Jor-
dan’s parents, preaches the importance
of Jordan staying connected to home.
“The thing is, if you’re trying to be success-
ful, and home don’t support you, what hap-
pens when the world turns its back on you?”
he asks me. “But if your home still respects
you, they’ll always be there. So I appreciate
him coming back here.”
The coach—who has worked at the school
for forty-one years and has a wall inscribed
with his wisdoms called “Life According to
Fairfax”—considers all the
Arts High kids his kids, in-
cluding the cynosure on set.
He tells me that at one point,
Jordan was one of the best
players in the state and av-
eraged twenty-four points
per game. Trust, twenty-four
points per game is a prime
scoring average at any level. I tease Coach
Fairfax that Jordan’s jumper looked a little
rusty in the gym. And he says, “Did you see
me walk over there and whisper to him? I
told him to bend his knees. And you saw what
happened after that.”
While MBJ shoots, Coach gets a call
from his daughter. “Oh, yeah. I’m with him
right now,” the coach says, and with a cer-
tain self-possession glides onto the court
and slaps the phone into MBJ’s hand. Jor-
dan sounds delighted to hear from her, and
they talk long enough to convince me he ain’t
rushing off the call.
There’s busy, and then there’s too busy for
your people, and the latter he is not.
THE HIGH LINE,
FOR THE FASHION SHOW
The High Line is a once-abandoned rail
track on the West Side of Manhattan—and,
that evening, the venue for the Coach 1941
(’41 being the year of the brand’s founding)
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