NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. _ Michael Jordan is here at the Peach Jam. Not physically but metaphorically, in every one of his Nike silhouette logos _ the Jump Man, it's called _ and in every Nike swoosh on every sneaker and jersey and pullover that the college coaches are wearing.
They're lined up in chairs on the edge of the court, watching some of the best high school basketball prospects in the country. There's Roy Williams, the North Carolina coach, in light blue. A while ago he suggested that Jordan was being forgotten by the younger generation.
If it's true it should become clear while asking prospects about Jordan _ who he is, what he represents _ at the Peach Jam. There are few better places than here to find out what Jordan means to a generation of players who weren't alive for the most influential part of his basketball career.
For UNC, especially, it's an important question. For years _ how many, exactly, is difficult to quantify _ Jordan was perhaps the Tar Heels' greatest marketing and recruiting asset. Players throughout the 1980s and '90s grew up wanting, as the old Gatorade slogan went, to "be like Mike."
Have those who have grown up in the past decade even heard of that phrase?
"I've heard no one say nothing about it," Jalek Felton, one of the top prospects in the class of 2017, said on Wednesday in Charlotte, where he was attending an Under Armour basketball camp.
Felton, the nephew of former UNC point guard Raymond Felton, has committed to play at UNC. He's been on campus many times, has played pick-up with his uncle and other former UNC players, some in the NBA.
The younger Felton has been by UNC's basketball museum, where he watched Jordan highlights, and he said he has even met Jordan and spoken with him "a couple of times." But Jordan's name, Felton said, doesn't often come up among high school players these days.
It's the "new school," Felton said, "that's what's hot right now _ Steph Curry, LeBron James."
They played against each other in a thrilling seven-game NBA Finals in which James led the Cleveland Cavaliers to the championship, Cleveland's first in a major professional sport in more than 50 years. Jordan helped extend the city's misery with a memorable game-winning shot over Craig Ehlo in 1989.
