Even though this is baseball season, I want to begin with a basketball story. It is about Michael Jordan, perhaps the greatest professional basketball player of all time. One night he scored sixty-nine points in a single game.

In that same game, rookie Stacey King made his inauspicious debut. He shot one free throw and made it. After the final buzzer, a reporter asked King for his thoughts on the game. Stacey King, with tongue planted firmly in his cheek, replied: “I’ll always remember this as the night that Michael Jordan and I combined for 70 points.”

Well, I guess that is one way to look at it.

Michael Jordan was a great basketball player. And yet John Eliot, in his book titled Overachievement, claims that Michael Jordan was not really a very gifted basketball player. For example, Jo…