I had dinner with Michael Jordan during the NBA Finals.
A stickler for facts might say, "No you didn't. You had dinner at Jordan's restaurant, but he was not even on the premises."To which I would reply: "Look, just because Michael wasn't there, walking around, doesn't mean he wasn't there. A true believer doesn't need physical evidence of existence."
In Michael Jordan's The Restaurant, in downtown Chicago, you sense his presence. It's like the old song, "On the Street Where You Live," where the guy sings, "The o-o-o-ver-powering feeling, that any second you might suddenly appear."
If Jordan does appear, you better pray you're not waiting for a table.
"When Michael shows up for dinner, people (seated in the dining room) just don't leave," said John MacLeod, assistant general manager of Michael Jordan's. "They sit and sit. The restaurant comes to a standstill."
This despite the fact that Jordan and his party quickly slip into a private, glassed-in cubicle in the corner of the dining room, and its venetian blinds are snapped closed.
That's how big Jordan is in Chicago. A zillion people a day try to get into this restaurant because it is a way of getting close to Jordan, even if he's not in town.
It's less a restaurant than a shrine, more a religious experience than a dining experience.
Jordan opened his restaurant last April. Actually, what Jordan did was contribute some money, lend his name and send over crates of jerseys to be hung on the walls.
"Michael's investment is very small, his return huge," is how one source put it.
The place is popular. The phone company logged the number of calls coming into the restaurant one day recently: seven thousand.
They don't take reservations at dinner, and the wait for a table is usually about three hours, so it's wise to pack a lunch.
A woman who was near tears was pleading to the receptionist, "You told me 45 minutes, and it has been 21/2 hours."
That's serious hang time.
The restaurant is three stories high, an old building that once was a trolley-car repair barn. The top floor is for banquets, the middle floor for regular dining, and the ground floor is a bar and souvenir store.
They could have called this place the Museum of Modern Mike. On the front wall outside is a huge mural of Jordan, soaring, dunk-bound.
Inside, suffice it to say that even though I am absentminded, I never once had to turn to my wife and ask, "Say, Honey, what famous person owns this restaurant?"
The bar is lined with Jordan framed jerseys of the dozens of teams for which he has played - collegiate, Olympics, pro, All-Star.
Above the bar is a massive video screen. Aside from Chicago Stadium, this is the hottest place in Chicago to watch a Bulls game.
When pregame introductions of the Bulls' starters come onto the screen, bartenders turn off the room lights, stand on the bar and shine spotlights around the room, recreating the chaotic ambience of the Stadium. Mafioso dons on the lam from the law can request seating in the no-spotlight section.
In the restaurant foyer hangs a huge art thing that is supposed to be Jordan, and there is a massive oil portrait of a smiling Air, and posters. The dining room is an art gallery of basketball paintings, and there are about a million framed magazine covers featuring Air.
The food is good. I ordered a Big Mac, Wheaties and Gatorade, with a Pepsi chaser. Just kidding. Jordan's corporate food tie-ins are not featured on the restaurant's basic, well-rounded menu.
I ordered fish, which is a mistake in Chicago. You don't go to a city dubbed by Carl (Don't Call Me Ryne) Sandburg "hog butcher for the world" and order a delicate piece of fish.
My wife also realized why Sandberg didn't call Chicago "crab butcher for the world," although she enjoyed her crab-cake dinner.
My son did the right thing, ordering the macaroni and cheese, which is a cult dish because it is made from a secret recipe of Juanita (Mrs. Air) Jordan.
Ordering something other than the mac-'n-cheese at Jordan's is like going to Graceland and asking to see the statues of Bruce Springsteen.
MacLeod was kind enough to show us the inside of the shrine de la shrine, the private Jordan dining room.
It is a small, nondescript room reserved exclusively for Air and his pals. This is where Jordan and Barkley dined during the Finals, a meal that, continuing the religious theme, Jordan told Barkley was "your last supper."
MacLeod said Jordan occasionally ventures out of his cloister and into the restaurant itself, and when he dined here after the Bulls' clincher over the Knicks in the Eastern Conference finals, Jordan leaned out of a second-floor window and tossed T-shirts to revelers on the sidewalk below.
Jordan's isn't the only celebrity restaurant in the Chicago area. Harry Caray and Oprah Winfrey have joints. Mike Ditka and Jim McMahon had restaurants that folded, because, said MacLeod, they were absentee owners, whereas Jordan shows up on a fairly regular basis.
But the lure of The Restaurant is that it is Mike's. If this was Scottie Pippen's The Restaurant, or Ryne Sandberg's The Restaurant, would folks wait in line three hours for a decent meal in a pleasant setting?
Twenty minutes, maybe.
Twenty minutes is a wait. Three hours is a pilgrimage. The Restaurant is a living display of the profound devotion Jordan inspires.
On the way out we stopped in Michael Jordan's The Store. You can buy Laney Buccaneers T-shirts. Laney was Jordan's high school in North Carolina.
But the most popular items are T-shirts and caps bearing the logo, which is a drawing of The Restaurant with a gigantic basketball that seems to be crashing through the roof like a meteorite, a heavenly dunk.
How's the souvenir business?
"We've sold 1,000 caps and 1,000 T-shirts," the guy behind the counter said.
"Since the restaurant opened?" I asked.
"Oh, no. Tonight."
My advice is to buy the T-shirt before dinner, put it on and give it a sizable macaroni-and-cheese grease stain that will let everyone know that you've really been there.