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For young and old, high-flying basketball hero Michael Jordan is the best of players. In the last couple of years, he's gained fans among younger and younger kids. At a nearby school, I asked a fifth-grade class if they knew where Jordan had lived when he was a fifth grader. They not only knew he was from Brooklyn, they knew he had played guard on his college team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They were way ahead of me.
So is poet Eloise Greenfield. She understands how much kids lionize Jordan and what the game represents to many of them. In For the Love of the Game: Michael Jordan and Me, she takes this adulation to new heights in freeform verse starring a young girl and boy. Beginning with Jordan's determination and joy in playing the game, she moves to their perspective -- all the choices they have, the discouragement they face from "naysayers," and finally the inspiration they find from people who love them and the likes of Jordan. "In the game of life . . . I take my stance, I make my move."
Jan Spivey's golden, glowing full-page watercolor illustrations capture the feeling of Greenfield's words well. Characters -- Jordan as a child and an adult, other players, the girl, the boy -- are clearly represented. These figures stand out against indefinite wash backgrounds that make them more piercing. The poem is about inner strength and character, and Spivey's art makes the point as well as Greenfield's words. The image of a bald eagle is in almost every illustration, subdued in some, dominant in others. Using this high-flying, keen-sighted bird seems to be Spivey's contribution to the book since it's never mentioned in the text, but its symbolic meaning is clear at the end.
Greenfield and Spivey have worked together on 16 books. In 1990 Spivey received the Coretta Scott King Award for her illustrations in Greenfield's Nathaniel Talking. Though Greenfield has been writing African American children's books since the early 1970s, she stays contemporary with her choice of characters and situations. After all, she's writing about Michael Jordan. But she's also writing an age-old message to kids who need encouragement to stand tall and fly high. They need to "love the game."
I'm pulling for the Bulls myself.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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