Yes, Michael Jordan is the greatest player ever. And he's not, on balance, a bad role model. But the fact that he's sometimes described as a wonderful role model is a sign of how low our standards have fallen.

To begin with, Jordan is something of an egomaniac. If you don't believe it, read Sam Smith's The Jordan Rules, which recounts, among other things, Jordan's trying to usurp his coach's authority, telling teammates he favored not to pass the ball to teammates he didn't. True, Jordan has become more team-minded since his early years. But even today, a not-atypical post-game interview has him saying something like, "Well, tonight my teammates just didn't seem to be in gear, so I had to carry the team."

Also, though I don't want to get too puritanical here, Jordan is known for things like spending the night before a playoff game gambling at a casino, and dropping tens of thousands of dollars to a shady golf hustler. For obvious reasons, it is frowned on for pro athletes to get close to the gambling world.

Nike has launched a series of Jordan ads that seem intended to inspire inner-city kids. Some do seem to be a positive influence. In one, Jordan stresses that setbacks and failures are inevitable ingredients of great achievement. Other ads, however, are of more debatable value. In one, he complains about people who say he's slowed down with age. He says he likes it when these people "disrespect" him, because he can then prove them wrong. Presumably Nike would claim that this is a valuable lesson for young blacks, an inspiration to get into Harvard Business School and prove the doubters wrong. But in invoking "disrespect," the ad nourishes one of the largest cultural handicaps that many inner-city blacks carry into the vocational world--an acute sensitivity to slights, whether from bosses, colleagues, or customers. (The sensitivity is understandable, given black history and ongoing prejudice; encouraging it is not.) And in depicting basketball games as an occasion for Jordan to show all doubters how great he is--as opposed to an occasion on which teamwork prevails--the Nike ad embraces the inner-city hoops ethos, with its obliquely negative effects.

On balance, the newest Jordan ads may be a good thing. Even so, these glimmers of goodness shouldn't distract us from the overall corruptness of Nike's marketing machine. (Nike executives have said forthrightly that their general policy is to look for "bad boy" athletes to feature in ads.) And in any event, ads featuring Jordan never constitute a financial risk for the public good, which is what I'm advocating.