Michael Jordan in his dorm room in 1983

Hat tip, John Muse.

The first thing that jumps out at you is how skinny he looks. Obviously, he hasn’t been doing too much weight training as of 1983. I was playing junior varsity basketball as a high school freshman in 1982-83, and already we were under quite a lot of pressure from our coach to lift weights. But the fashion was not yet that old. It’s an early 1980’s thing. (For those playing sports, I mean. Weight-lifting as a general wellness activity is more from around 1990 or so.)

There used to be a feeling that baseball players, for example, would become worse through lifting weights too much. Detroit’s Lance Parrish was one of the first bulky-looking, weight-lifting baseball stars, and I seem to recall that there was some controversy at the time as to whether or not Parrish should be doing this.

To this day, it remains more of an American phenomenon, I think. One of the interesting things to me about Europe is that you can’t always be sure who the good athletes are just by looking at people. But in the U.S., it’s now pretty easy– the good athletes are the really bulked-up guys who lift weights all the time. In Europe, the concept of being a good athlete is still more closely connected with invisible physical traits, such as agility.

Come to think of it, there was a story from my Chicago days about Jordan and weight training. He started very late, and that meant that he really couldn’t lift much weight compared with his teammates– all of them his inferiors in basketball, of course. But Jordan was so competitive that he didn’t want to lose to his teammates in the weight-lifting category. As a result, he had to be given a private weight coach and a private weight room. It being Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls were of course willing to pay for these separate facilities without complaint.