NBA Dynasties Can Help Save The World

Right now it’s the hotness in the streets to say that the Golden State Warriors are bad for basketball. That they’re too dominant. That they’re ruining the very sanctity of the sport. Which is hardly a new sentiment by any stretch. This Sports Illustrated cover from 1997 asked the same question about Jordan’s Bulls that people are asking about the Warriors right now. And tonight, 21 years later, I hope people can begin to understand just how dumb that question was.

Per the Washington Post in 2013:

At the end of her two-day trip to North Korea in October 2000, a historic but ultimately failed effort to thaw relations, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright presented her host with a gift. The State Department officials working on the trip had put special attention into selecting and procuring the item, which they hoped might show an earnest desire for more direct talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Albright handed Kim an authentic NBA basketball signed by Michael Jordan.

“He may have been initially surprised by it, but you could tell he was pleased. I don’t think he expected it. It was a very personal gesture, in a sense,” a former State Department and CIA official told the San Diego Union-Tribune of Kim’s reaction. “It showed him we went through some effort to get the signature. They realized it wasn’t just an ordinary ball.”

Kim Jong Il, who spent most of his life in North Korea before inheriting the throne from his own father in 1994, was once quoted by state media as saying, “We should make our youths and workers play a lot of basketball.” Kim was said to own “a video library of practically every game Michael Jordan ever played for the Bulls,” according to the Union-Tribune.

In 2001, a year after Albright’s visit, the North Korean government formally invited Jordan to visit the country. Had he not decline, he would have become the first high-profile American celebrity to meet with a North Korean leader. Instead, Dennis Rodman, also a Bulls alum, took that honor this week, sitting alongside Kim Jong Eun at a basketball game.

So while you were at home bitching and moaning about how Jordan and Pippen had no competition, the Kim family was in their palace with their jaws agape in awe and amazement at the Bulls’ dominance. Who would have thought in that moment that a green-haired Dennis Rodman would become a key cog in world peace negotiations 20 years down the road. Who knows what aspiring young dictators are out there right now, looking up at the stars, basking in the glory of the Warriors third title in four years, hoping to one day meet Kevin Durant or Steph Curry, only to have Draymond Green be the lone member to accept their friendship in order to halt World War III.

So the next time you fix your lips to complain about a historically dominant basketball team, remember these Dennis Rodman videos – tears streaming down his cheeks, selling ad space across his chest for a website which I assume opens with no less than 14 simultaneous virus inducing popups – and realize that it was much bigger than the NBA Finals. Much bigger than parity among the small markets. Much more significant than something as insignificant as competitive balance. It could be about the fate of the free world as we know it.