Robert Ryans hung with Jordan from a distance. After almost every home game, Jordan would cool down at Zola, the spy-chic restaurant a block from the MCI Center. Joining him in a rear dining room would be Oakley, Ewing, and sometimes one of Jordan's brothers. And after almost every home game, Ryans would trek in from his Bethesda office, perch himself at the Zola bar within shout-out distance of Jordan's crew, and set up a sort of satellite office of testosterone.
Ryans arranged his social calendar to take full advantage of Jordan's wattage. On game nights, women crowded Zola's bar top and the barroom walls, hoping to catch a flash of that minted Michael smile. As Ryans describes it, they would stare at Jordan as he ate pasta and they worked themselves into a heat, exchanging fantasies of what they would let Jordan do to them if given a chance. The long nights, the body shots...
But lucky for Ryans, they weren't very aggressive about making dreams a reality. At Zola, an unspoken rule governed the passions: You didn't break the Jordan circle. You could look, you could say hi, but you couldn't sit at Jordan's table unless invited. The megavolts of female sexual energy threatened to overload the circuits, and that's when Ryans, with a chrome dome like Jordan's, stepped it up.
"They would fantasize about him, and here I am: the alternative," says Ryans, a financial planner, gesturing at his physical attributes to indicate his runner-up value.
Jordan may have been selfish on the court, but at Zola, he was the assist leader. Ryans says that thanks to Jordan, he scored every night. "It worked out 100 percent. Not 20 percent, not 80 percent. One hundred percent."
He revises the calculation: "Almost 100 percent." On the Saturday after Jordan left, Ryans drank alone.