And now ... your Chicago Bully
Michael Jordan says he had to be a tyrant in practice to win championships. Basketball history suggests otherwise.
Good morning. Let’s basketball.
Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya
Sunday’s penultimate doubleheader of The Last Dance had a few different threads by necessity of the chronology we’ve reached. The earlier narrative went through Jordan’s first retirement and jaunt to over to baseball, the tragic murder of Jordan’s father, Jordan’s comeback and the epic 1995-96 season — it’s nearly caught up to the later narrative, where the Bulls are about to face the Pacers in the 1998 Eastern Conference Finals. (The framing here is interesting, as it appears the Bulls are taking the Pacers lightly. We know Indiana almost beat Chicago in this series. Can’t wait to see how it’s framed.)
Per usual, we are reminded at every turn how ineluctably talented and hard-working Jordan was. The training scenes both during the baseball sojourn and after the baseball sojourn are wonderful. But these are also the episodes that deal with how much of a bully Jordan was on the practice court. The two key threads here are Jordan punching Steve Kerr in the eye amid a scuffle in training camp in 1995 and Jordan’s relentless taunting of Scott Burrell during the 1997-98 season. Kerr, Jud Buechler, Bill Wennington, Toni Kukoc and others all chime in to confirm that MJ did indeed create a culture of fear within the Bulls locker room, that everyone was wary of drawing the G.O.A.T.’s ire.
This is not new information for basketball fans. What’s a little surprising is Jordan’s full-throated defense of the behavior as necessary for the Bulls to win championships … and the fact that no one challenges this idea. Not Kerr, who knows better based on his success with the Spurs and Warriors. Not Phil Jackson, who knows better. Not Scott Burrell, not John Paxson, not Scottie Pippen — no one challenges Jordan on this central, controversial tenet of his leadership style, that being a bully is necessary to get the best out of your teammates.
In fact, Jordan pulls out the old “you wouldn’t understand because you’ve never won anything” canard.
Jordan is defiant and offended about criticism of his leadership style that no one in the documentary actually dares commit. So why does he react this way — to the point of apparently shedding tears over perceived distaste over him bullying teammates to toughen them up for the playoffs?
Because he knows how it looks!
That’s where all of this stuff about Jordan being worried about how the public will perceive him, and about doc director Jason Hehir being surprised Jordan gave the green light for the material for these episodes. (Yes, in fact it does make me very curious about what footage MJ iced.) On the one hand, Jordan is fully comfortable with this aspect of his narrative. He’s defiant. He’s angry and emotional at the mere hint of this side of him being criticized. On the other hand, he knows how it looks to normal people and seems worried on how it reflects on his legacy.
What goes completely unacknowledged in the documentary is that Jordan’s central defense of the behavior — that it was necessary to get the most out of his teammates — is entirely bullshit.
Here’s a list of the best player on every championship team since Jordan’s last win in 1998: Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Chauncey Billups, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Garnett, Dirk Nowitzki, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant. Of those 11 superstars whose teams won the last 21 championships, only two (Bryant and Garnett) share Jordan’s leadership style. And that’s being generous to include Garnett, whose more of a bully to small European opponents than his teammates, to whom he seems deeply loyal, fights with Wally Szczerbiak aside.
This isn’t to say any of these players are great teammates — I am sympathetic, for instance, to arguments that playing with LeBron is quite difficult because of his ball dominance and the constant fear of getting traded. But there’s simply no evidence that for a superstar, getting the most out of your teammates requires bullying them into giving maximum effort. Frankly, it’s not remotely debatable: look at that list. Tim Duncan?! Tim Duncan was the best player on four championship teams. By every indication, he was the sweetest superstar teammate ever. You could argue that Duncan was the feather and Gregg Popovich was the hammer, but Jordan isn’t arguing that someone has to ride players hard. He’s arguing that he had to, or the Bulls wouldn’t succeed. And yet … the Spurs won five titles with Duncan, four with Duncan as the best player on the roster.
Like LeBron, there’s evidence that Kevin Durant is a difficult teammate, but not at all in this way. A team led by quiet Durant and sweet Steph Curry (the 2017 Warriors) may have supplanted Jordan’s 1996 Bulls as the best ever. Explain that with Jordan’s theory of leadership.
This wasn’t true before Jordan either! No one argues Isiah Thomas was a menace to his own teammates. Larry Bird nor Magic Johnson rode their Celtics or Lakers compatriots like MJ rode the Bulls. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the most successful basketball player in history and still my personal pick for the No. 2 best player ever (behind MJ and ahead of LeBron), was nothing like this. I don’t know, was Hakeem Olajuwon pantsing Kenny Smith while MJ was playing baseball? Is that why the Rockets snuck in those two titles?
Letting Jordan claim unchallenged that the Bulls won six championships in eight years even in part because Jordan was an asshole to Scott Burrell and Horace Grant and punched Steve Kerr in the eye and struck fear into Jud Buechler and Bill Wennington — it doesn’t pass the smell test. Why did the Bulls win all of those championships, really? Because Jordan was the greatest player of the generation and probably all-time, because Pippen was both a legitimate superstar and a tremendous fit alongside MJ, because Jackson is one of the greatest coaches ever, because Jerry Krause assembled a very high-level supporting cast including Rodman, Grant and Kukoc.
Spoiler alert, but we know the 1998 championship did not rest on Scott Burrell’s shoulders, despite his one good game against the Hornets. Jordan calling Scott Burrell a ‘ho’ all year long didn’t turn Scott Burrell into a stone-cold killer in the postseason. It just didn’t work. But hey, it did make him a minor celebrity briefly in the year 2020. So that’s something.
That Burrell, Kerr and everyone involved in the documentary lets Jordan get away with this claim unchallenged is really a disservice to Jordan’s legacy. If it results in a resurgence of asshole team leader tendencies among the impressionable kids watching this documentary, that will have been a real unfortunate turn of events.
Hard work, high expectations, focus, grit — these are all important and extremely valuable, and there are something that list of 11 superstars who led their teams to the last 22 championships all do have in common with MJ. But based on what we’ve seen of these incredibly successful players, you don’t have to punch your teammates in the face or ride them into fear to be a leader.
Jordan says that this is who he is, and how he led — that’s all fine and good. No one asked Jordan to change, to do it differently. In the sense that Jordan couldn’t change who he was as a competitor, then yes, this “had to be done.” This was MJ’s style, and you don’t win six titles without MJ. The problem is in suggesting that this is how it has to be for everyone, because it clearly doesn’t and certainly shouldn’t be the norm. And yet, it seems to be what Jordan and the documentary are arguing in defense of Jordan’s action and, unwittingly, at the expense of Jordan’s legacy.
An Inexcusable Absence
While we’re here, there’s a follow-up on the chatter about the Dream Team and Jordan’s role in keeping Isiah Thomas off the roster from last week. You may remember that in The Last Dance, both Jordan and Rod Thorn, the Dream Team’s architect, claim that MJ never said he wouldn’t play if Isiah was invited to Barcelona. This claim was made in a documentary in 2020, eight years after Jack McCallum’s book Dream Team quoted both Jordan and Thorn acknowledging that MJ said he wouldn’t play in the ‘92 Olympics if Isiah made the United States roster.
That’s a pretty bad error for the documentary team. They let Jordan and Thorn lie to the audience about something they’d already admitted to doing.
It gets worse. McCallum has a podcast series on the Dream Team premiering later this month. He went on Zach Lowe’s podcast last week to discuss it (among other topics — great episode, check it out). McCallum reveals that he has audio of Jordan acknowledging he kept Isiah off the Dream, and that audio will appear in the podcast series.
McCallum, who is a surprising absence from the doc given his prominence as a national NBA scribe for SI in the ‘90s, also reveals on Lowe’s podcast that he was scheduled to be interviewed on camera for The Last Dance … but got bumped for Justin Timberlake, whose expert contributions to the documentary through eight of 10 episodes are limited to … telling the world he had a pair of Air Jordans as a kid.
Ouch.
Be excellent to each other.
Complete agreement. MJ was an asshole because he could be and was partly enabled by Jackson, who clearly knew. Curry and Duncan are all you need to show the utter BS of MJ's approach. And yes male toxicity is a thing and this doc only fuels it.