At the time, Steinbrenner said he thought Reinsdorf was joking.

"I haven't talked to Michael," Reinsdorf said yesterday. "I like him with the White Sox or Bulls. Whatever makes him happy, I'm for."

Jordan was said to be unhappy as a minor league ballplayer in the middle of the major league players' labor dispute. Having played last season with the White Sox's Class AA team in Birmingham, Ala., where he hit .202 in his first organized baseball season since high school, Jordan said he had no intention of being a replacement player.

"He's got no other thing to go to now with baseball off," said Jackson, who confirmed a radio report that Jordan had watched game films with him after Wednesday's practice.

That's the puzzling aspect to all this: While Jordan cleared out his locker at the White Sox's spring-training facility in Sarasota, Fla., last week, he does not have to return to the team's minor league facility until tomorrow. Theoretically, he could still join the White Sox's AAA Nashville team, where he was scheduled to play this season, anyway, and participate in minor league games without upsetting major leaguers.

It is possible that Jordan, marginal at best as a baseball player, tired of the politically charged atmosphere surrounding the sport. He is a renowned man of action who this week told Pippen that he has been "bored silly" in recent weeks.

When he retired from the Bulls on Oct. 6, 1993, following the team's third straight N.B.A. championship and the murder of his father, James, the previous summer, Jordan claimed that he was tired of the demands created by the celebrity life. He was especially bitter about the furor created by reports involving his gambling on golf matches.

"If he's coming back, then it's great for the game," the Knicks' general manager, Ernie Grunfeld, said last night. "But if he was sick of the spotlight then, imagine what's going to go on now."