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The heir to Air is apparent

But as far as I am concerned, the NBA can breathe easier -- a successor to Michael Jordan is in place and he is the man they had hoped for, someone without tattoos, navel rings or a rap sheet.

The evolution of the NBA, just 50 years old, is easy to trace from the big white men of its earliest years, to the big black men of the '70s, to the new-age players -- smaller, but smarter and quicker and more versatile -- who now rule professional basketball.

In the NBA's first year, Joe Fulks was the only man to average more than 20 points, but he shot 30 percent from the floor in the process. George Mikan and Dolph Shayes were the stars of the 50s, when the players were white and the shoes were black, when most of our families had no television and professional basketball was mostly a rumor if you lived south of Baltimore or west of Milwaukee.

Integration changed the face of the league, but not the size of its brightest stars. Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ruled until 20 years ago, when a guy with a mountain of hair and the ability to fly came to the league from the old ABA.

Julius Erving was the best there was, flying through the air, swooping in on the basket, making the most of his 6-foot-7-inch body. He was the first in the line of succession that has led us to Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and now Grant Hill.

Yes, Grant Hill!

Oh, argue about it if you care to in Los Angeles, where Shaquille O'Neal showed up this season with a lot of promises and his eye on the movie business, or in Houston where Hakeem Olajuwon has established a claim on being the game's best man, but little else.

They will score a few more points a game than Hill and maybe get a few more rebounds, but they will not control the way the game is played or the way it is viewed as much as Hill in the final years of the millenium.

The game has moved past the dominance of big men.

Erving began it, and those who have dominated the game since have had not so much size as desire and intelligence and passion. And while Bird's athleticism and quickness did not rival the others, he made up for those deficiencies with an indefagitable will that turned the Boston Celtics into world champions and K. C. Jones into a luxury, not a necessity.

Now, midway though his third season, Hill has arrived, a couple of years behind the NBA's desperate publicity campaign for him, and today -- as the league prepares for its annual All-Star Game, there is no one else in the league who plays the game from end to end as well as Jordan and Hill.

A year or two down the line, when Jordan grows tired of all of this, when he decides there are no more challenges for him here, and walks away, Hill will be the best player in basketball -- barring illness or injury -- not because the league pre-ordained it or because I say so, but because he is finally understanding what a lot of people knew before: That his overall skills are unmatched by any man who has come into the league in this decade.

"Now," he said earlier this season, "if I go to a third All-Star Game, I'll feel I'm right there with Michael. ... I'm definitely as good or better than all those guys."

That is the new assertiveness of Grant Hill, the new edge, sharpened by 200 games in the NBA and by the Olympic experience last summer.

"A little more testiness," Doug Collins calls it.

And Hill does not disagree.

"I am more confident," he says. "And I am more assertive."

The change has been lost on neither opponents nor officials, who are becoming accustomed to being challenged by the new Grant Hill, who has been hit with a handful of technicals this season.

"If I had a problem with a call last year, I let it be," he says. "Now I say something."

Some of that is due to his new awareness -- born of a month of close contact with other Dream Teamers last summer -- that his game and his attitude are better than most. Oddly, part of the new attitude may even be due to the time he spent making a series of commercials in which Bill Laimbeer and George (The Animal) Steele tried to transform Hill from a nice guy into a Bad Boy.

"That commercial was a reflection of who I was," he says.

The cause of the transformation is not as important as the fact that it has happened. There is little chance he will ever have to come up with bail money, but he is no longer the posterboy for "Nice."

His confidence, his cockiness, his attitude have caught up with his game. Now he plays with the superior attitude of a Julius Erving, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird or Michael Jordan.

And in him there burns the search for perfection that separates the very good NBA players from the great.

"It's weird," he says. "Everybody talks about the great first half of the season I'm having. I don't see it as much. I always see what I'm not doing. You know, it's like: 'Is the glass half full or half empty?' I guess I always see it as half empty. I'm like my dad, looking at it from the negative side."

Grant Hill is better, tougher, more confident, more aggressive. And he is not satified.

He will be the successor to Michael Jordan; the only question is: Will that happen after Jordan retires, or before?

Charlie Vincent, veteran columnist of the Detroit Free-Press, is a regular contributor to ESPNET SportsZone.