Michael Jordan’s relentless commitment to winning sometimes spilled over, most notably onto his own teammates.
Jordan was depicted as an aggressive competitor in ‘The Last Dance’, often laying into teammates Scott Burrell and Steve Kerr during practices whether through name-calling, outright bullying or even physical violence.
“I disagreed with him one time,” Kerr once said. “I think he punched me in the face.”
Jud Buechler said teammates were ‘afraid’ of Jordan, calling him a ‘jerk’ and an ‘a**hole’ – something that brought ‘His Airness’ to tears in the smash Netflix documentary, The Last Dance.
Even in retirement Jordan has struggled to shed the ‘bully’ tag. Stories like this next one involving former teammate Horace Grant certainly don’t help his cause.
Longtime NBA writer and Bulls insider Sam Smith, who was featured in show, told the Tolbert, Krueger and Brooks Podcast that MJ would deny Grant food if he had a bad game.
“Players would come to me over the years and say, ‘You know what he did? He took Horace [Grant’s] food away on the plane because Horace had a bad game,’ Smith told the hosts.
“[Michael] told the stewardesses ‘Don’t feed him, he doesn’t deserve to eat.’
“They would tell me stuff like that and they they’d say ‘Why don’t you write this?’ And I would say ‘Well I can’t write it unless you say it.’
“I don’t do ‘league sources.’ You can’t do that kind of stuff on these kind of things. ‘If you want to be quoted I’ve got no problem with that.’ ‘No, no, no we can’t say that about Michael Jordan.”
6ft 10in Grant, famous for his signature goggles, was part of Chicago’s first three-peat, helping Jordan capture three straight NBA championships from 1991 to 1993.
The former power forward joined Shaquille O’Neal‘s Orlando Magic in 1994, beating the MJ-less Bulls in the Eastern Conference semifinals with the team still recovering from Jordan’s abrupt decision to retire and play baseball.
Grant was also featured in The Last Dance, although his relationship with Air Jordan has fractured in the years since being teammates.
In the documentary, Jordan alleges that Grant leaked inside information about the Bulls to Smith for his famous ‘Jordan Rules’ book — something Grant vehemently denies.
On the other side, Grant, like other former teammates, was unhappy with the portrayal of various players and situations throughout the documentary.
“I would say [it was] entertaining, but we know, who was there as teammates, that about 90% of it — I don’t know if I can say it on air, but B.S. in terms of the realness of it,” Grant said. “It wasn’t real, because a lot of things [Jordan] said to some of his teammates, that his teammates went back at him. But all of that was kind of edited out of the documentary, if you want to call it a documentary.”
In a 2020 interview on KNBR in San Francisco, Smith relayed the story about Jordan telling flight attendants not to serve Grant food on the plane after a bad game — a story which Grant says is true but with one key footnote: he always went back at MJ.
“Anybody [who] knows me, as a rookie, if anybody comes up and tries to snatch my food away, I’m going to do my best to beat their a**,” Grant said.
“And believe me, back then, I could have took MJ in a heartbeat. Yes, it’s true that he told the flight attendant, ‘Well, don’t give him anything because he played like crap.’ And I went right back at him. I said some choice words that I won’t repeat here. But I said some choice words and stood up. ‘If you want it, you come and get it.’ And of course, he didn’t move. He was just barking. But that was the story.
“But anybody [who] knows me, where I come from and what I stand for, come on, man. There’s nobody in this earth would ever come and try to take food off my plate and not get their rear ends beaten.”
“Let me clear something up about this food thing, that he tried to take my food,” Grant said in a separate interview. “I would have beat his ass, guys. … You come back and try to take my food? I would have whipped his a**. [There] wouldn’t be no Air Jordans right now. It wouldn’t be no six championships, I guarantee you that.”
Jordan was a transcendent, one of one star, destined for sporting immortality. But he couldn’t reach the summit of the basketball mountain without the help of his teammates, which is why he so often pushed their buttons to get the most out of them.
In Jordan’s defense, he never proclaimed to be a role model either.
“It’s never going to be enough for everybody. I know that. I realize that . . .” No.23 says in The Last Dance. “The way that I go about my life, is that I set examples. If that inspires you, great. You know, I will continue to do that. If it doesn’t, maybe I’m not the person you should be following.”
“They’re going to say ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy, he may have been a tyrant.
“Well that’s you, because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them [his teammates] to win and be a part of that as well.”
Air Jordan’s approach was unorthodox, to say the least, but nobody could say it didn’t work.
His dynastic Bulls won six NBA championships between 1991 and 1998, and Jordan cemented himself as the greatest player who ever lived.
His methods may have been unpopular, but nice guys don’t always win championships, and Jordan’s win-at-all costs mentality ultimately propelled himself, the Bulls, and his teammates, from obscurity to greatness.