A Community's Pride, Michael Even Bigger Than Rockne

No offense to those who have turned Never Can Say Goodbye into their Amazing Grace these days. It's just that, even though Michael Jackson is everybody's favorite icon, he mostly belongs to us. I'm referring to those of us from northern Indiana. He couldn't become the biggest celebrity of all time until he discovered ways to surpass the elite of the elite within his own state.

Actually, I should say within his own region.

This was tougher than you think.

While Michael and the rest of his siblings were spending their youth during the 1960s in Gary, Ind., I was doing the same just a few moonwalks to the east in South Bend, home of the Golden Dome, Touchdown Jesus and a whole bunch of other noteworthy persons, places and things through the decades.

Vivica Fox is one of us. Among others from South Bend, you had Junior Walker and his All-Stars of Motown Records fame. You also had Lloyd Haynes, who was Mr. Dixon in television's Room 222, and you had Mike Warren, among the stars of Hill Street Blues after his dribbling days at UCLA with Lew Alcindor.

Speaking of those Bruins, before John Wooden became the Wizard of Westwood, he was the legendary basketball coach at South Bend's Central High School .

They make the Hummer in South Bend, too, and this city of maybe 132,000 during the latter 20th century was the headquarters for Studebaker cars, Singer sewing machines, world-renowned fishing reels and Bendix Corporation, which was a builder of brakes and other mechanical parts for cars, trucks and planes.

If you put all of that together and multiply it by the sales of the Thriller album, it still wouldn't trump Michael's notoriety for the ages -- first among Hoosiers, then among everybody else. He even did the sacrilegious long before his Victory Tour during the mid-1980s: He surpassed the international and national fame associated with each of the legends from the university in South Bend. You know, some place called Notre Dame, featuring the Four Horsemen and the Gipper.

In addition, there have been seven Heisman Trophy winners for the Fighting Irish, complemented by a Joe Montana here and a Rocket there. They've also had magical coaches such as Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian and Lou Holtz.

Still, it's all about Michael, not only for now but for a while. Maybe forever. We needn't go further than the media's second-by-second coverage involving this musical genius, spanning from his sudden death last week to his pending funeral to the Michael chatter in general that will never end. He removed talk of the worst economy in 80 years from the tip of everybody's tongue. The ugliness in Iraq, Iran and North Korea? It has to wait, and the same goes for that sex scandal involving the South Carolina governor and news surrounding a pending Supreme Court nominee.

This is the stuff of JFK, Marilyn and Elvis.

Michael joins that select group of athletes, entertainers and politicians who are eternally bigger than life, and it happened for Michael in stages.

The little Michael of the Jackson 5 was followed by the big Michael of singular prominence and then the weird Michael of plastic surgery, crazy legal cases and dangling babies outside the window of his hotel room. He performed things with his body that hadn't been seen before or since. He invented pop culture with everything from his one-gloved hand to his white socks. Mostly, he touched the souls of listeners with songs that became the soundtrack of their lives, especially for those of us who traveled with Michael through his voice from nearly the start.

Has it been that long? I keep recalling the1960s, when we took regular family trips to Gary to visit my Uncle Virgil and Aunt Rosie, along with Fred and Beulah Ware, my parents' best friends, whose children were our play cousins. Gary often featured talent shows with splendid acts, and the Wares regularly went to them.

Anyway, there we were, my two brothers and I spending the night in Gary with our play cousins sometime during the mid-1960s, and one of them mentioned, "We just saw this group, and they were unbelievable. The group is made up of a bunch of brothers, and they call themselves the Jackson 5."

Fred Ware later noted that he worked in the Gary steel mills with a crane operator named Joe Jackson, the father of the brothers, who Fred described as "little things."

We shrugged. On a scale of wondering if Terry Hanratty could lead Notre Dame past USC that fall to the location of those marbles we lost in the backyard, the revelation of a Jackson 5 group didn't rank. Gary wasn't South Bend, but Gary still had its notables. They involved athletes such as the NFL's Alex Karras, basketball standout Dick Barnett and former middleweight champion Tony Zale. There also was that 1950s group called the Spaniels (Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight).

Suddenly, it was Spaniels, who cares? We were cheering loudly with everybody else throughout northern Indiana in 1969 when Michael and his brothers made their national debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. Then our cheering became boasting during those early years after every Jackson 5 song from I Want You Back to Got To Be There to -- you've guessed it -- I'm Going Back To Indiana.

As Hoosiers, they were our guys, and they always will be our guys.

In particular, Michael always will be our guy.

We'll share him, if you insist.

Terence Moore is a national columnist and commentator for FanHouse. He is a frequent panelist on "Rome Is Burning", an ESPN show hosted by Jim Rome, that is seen Monday through Friday at 4:30 PM ET. Moore spent more than three decades working for major newspapers, including 26 years as an award-winning sports columnist for the San Francisco Examiner and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He resides in Atlanta .