Thank you for winning six NBA titles and earning hundreds of millions of dollars.

If you ask why I thank you when obviously you did it for yourself, not for me—I will respond:  That’s exactly why I thank you.  I can imagine the pride you take in your achievements—of being the greatest ever in your field—but I wonder if you realize fully all you have to be proud of.

Most people, unfortunately, do not push themselves to excel—and the problem is not a lack of capacity.  Over a period of twenty years as a teacher, I have observed many talented students who squander their gifts.  It is not ability that is missing; it is will.

It is hard work for a man to actualize his potential.  Thomas Edison, who knew, defined genius as one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.  Many of us—perhaps most—do not wish to perspire that profusely.  But you, Michael, do not share such reluctance.

When the teen-age boy, cut from his high school basketball team, practices hours every day before school, he displays his work ethic.  When the University of North Carolina hero busts his rear-end at Bobby Knight’s drill-instructor practice sessions in order to win the Olympic gold, he reaffirms this commitment.  When the greatest player in the history of basketball continues, at age thirty-five, to out-hustle far younger players—on defense as well as on offense—to lead his aging team to yet another championship, he surpasses the meaning of such concepts as “dedication” and “perseverance”; he sets an example and a standard for which, perhaps, mankind has not yet developed a vocabulary.

The Chicago sportswriter who described you as “a supremely-talented over-achiever,” is admirably exact.  You are supremely-talented, and you performances are a marvel, an art form to behold.  But it is the “over-achieving” part that is so extraordinary.  For most of us, unlike you, are mere mortals; we cannot fly.  But we an aspire.  We can yearn to push ourselves to the limit of our ability and achieve the highest level possible to us.  In this regard, you are an inspiration.  When I see you playing in a championship game with a fever that would keep most men in bed—when I see that, physically, you are too weak to stand but that, by an act of will, you score thirty-eight points and hit the game-winning shot—it raises in me the feeling:  what can I achieve if I will myself similarly in my field and in my life?

It is true that basketball, like any sport, is merely a game; its events have no literal significance.  Mankind’s survival does not rest on the outcome of the World Series or the Super Bowl—not like it rests on the ability to grow food, cure diseases and invent new technologies.  Nevertheless, the events of athletic contests are not entirely without meaning.  The dedication to excellence—to being all one can be—that is necessary to win a championship (especially at the professional level, where one competes against the world’s best) suffuses sports with a level of meaning that goes far beyond the literal.  The superb athlete striving for a championship or a gold medal is a publicly-visible symbol of achievement.  He (or she) is a concrete reminder of the motto that so eloquently expresses the essence of the Olympic Games:  “Citius, Altius, Fortius”—“Swifter, Higher, Stronger.”  The great athlete is a symbol of man’s striving for perfection.

No athlete of our time, Michael, captures this meaning like you.  It isn’t merely or even primarily the dominance you exhibit on the basketball court; it is the way you conduct your life.  The way you dress, the way you speak, the importance of your family, your ads for the products you endorse, your loyalty to your coach and your team, the dignity and grace with which you handle the hoopla surrounding you, all add up to one thing:  class.  In an era in which so many athletes, musicians, movie stars and politicians are guilty of drug use, infidelity and domestic violence, you stand high above the rest as a man of dignity and stature.

I hope you realize that this is the source of your enormous popularity.  There are no heroes any more.  Great men are no longer revered in our society; they are derided.  America was once a land that gave rise to men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Wright brothers, et al.  In sports, she had men of great dignity like Joe Dimaggio and Jackie Robinson.  This used to be a country of giants, Michael, but now you are virtually the last one left.

Our culture has, in its explicit intellectual content, become hostile to achievement.  Bill Gate's great success has brought down on him anti-trust proceedings; Martha Stewart is accused of arrogance and is criticized by women’s groups (!); you are attacked for allegedly endorsing sweat shops.  The intellectuals, the media, the politicians are riddled with envy and hate the most able among us because of their success.  But the American people have not sunk to this level of corruption.

The American people may not understand the principles involved, but at an emotional level they still yearn for, and worship, man at his highest and best.  They are desperate for the sight of a hero.  In our whole culture, you are the one public figure who clearly meets the qualifications.  At the end of the twentieth century, you are the last American hero.  This is the reason that explains the lack of privacy, the mobs screaming at your heels, the inability—as you put it—to “walk down Michigan Avenue since 1985.”  What you mean to people, Michael, is something they can’t find anywhere else:  the sight of a living, great man.

The American people sense, in some visceral, non-intellectual way, that their heroes are being taken away from them.  They see all around them, in books and in films, stories about losers and low-lives.  It is clear to them why ours is called the “era of the anti-hero.”  They do not like it.  The reason they venerate you goes far beyond your mighty athletic prowess.  They revere you as the last symbol of human greatness in our culture.

It is unfortunate that the only example held out to us is a superb athlete, when clearly it is the mind, not the body, that is the source of our greatest achievements.  But the media rarely reports on the creative activities of the leading medical researchers, inventors or industrialists.  I am grateful that at least it still reports on the performances of great athletes.  This is the reason why so many people read only the sports page of the newspapers, and why sports are so popular in our country:  it is the last bastion of heroism sanctioned and permitted by the intellectual leadership of our culture.  As public figures, you—and a select few of your outstanding colleagues—are the sole standard-bearers of man’s pursuit of excellence.

Do not despair of your solitary pinnacle.  You are an inspiration, and you will be joined—in the twenty-first century—by others.  As the Babe Ruth of our era, you are a link between the glories of our past and the grandeur of our future.  In the meantime, your larger-than-life stature serves as a beacon to all of us who would be the heroes of our own lives.  As the only man I know who has a statue of himself outside his place of employment (and who has abundantly earned it) you are a concrete reminder of how much is open, potentially, to us all.

As Ayn Rand states in her great novel, Atlas Shrugged:  “the sight of an achievement is the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.”  You have offered such a gift, abundantly, to us.  You do, and will continue to, inspire those of us who, like you, hold a vivid concept of man’s proper stature, and who yearn to attain it.  This is the full measure of that for which you should be justly proud.  This is why I say to you, “Thank you.”  It is also why, as a devout atheist and man-worshiper, I say, with full reverence for the glory of human achievement:  Vaya con Dios, Michael—Go with God.