The cover is a polemic, an image that shocks and starts. The account inside is more harrowing still. In May of 1989, 17-year-old James David Martin led 15-year-old Michael Eugene Thomas into the woods, strangled him to death, and took his two-week-old pair of Air Jordans. In Sports Illustrated’s iconic account, Michael Jordan himself is sitting at his locker when he is told the story. He becomes solemn and grieved. “I can’t believe it,” he says, on the verge of tears. The nation has become a warzone, the story seems to say, fueled by desperation and decadence alike: a place where a red and white bundle of leather and polyurethane warrants murder.