For all of his otherworldly talent, tremendous business acumen and standing as arguably the greatest athlete in the history of professional sports, Michael Jeffrey Jordan is primarily known for one specific thing: being a fucking asshole.
He snuffed multiple teammates, delivered the pettiest Basketball Hall of Fame enshrinement speech in the history of modern mankind, routinely embarrasses the shit out of your favorite rappers and notoriously sneered, “fuck them kids” after jerking a basketball camp full of children—children!—out of free Jordans.
The man is a certified dick whose Top 8 on MySpace likely included The Grinch, Kim Jong Il and whoever keeps buying up all the goddamn toilet paper during this global pandemic.
Yet for some inexplicable reason, as The Athletic reports, His Airness is deeply concerned that The Last Dance, the upcoming ESPN documentary about Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls, will make him look like a “horrible guy.”
Does Satan have these same qualms every time somebody cracks open the bible? Does Trump wonder, “Will Twitter truly know my heart?”
Here’s what The Last Dance director Jason Hehir told The Athletic:
I said to him, ‘why do you want to do this?’ And he said, ‘I don’t.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ And he said, ‘When people see this footage I’m not sure they’re going to be able to understand why I was so intense, why I did the things I did, why I acted the way I acted, and why I said the things I said.’ He said there was a guy named Scotty Burrell who he rode for the entire season and, ‘When you see the footage of it, you’re going to think that I’m a horrible guy. But you have to realize that the reason why I was treating him like that is because I needed him to be tough in the playoffs and we’re facing the Indiana’s and Miami’s and New York’s in the Eastern Conference. He needed to be tough and I needed to know that I could count on him. And those are the kind of things where people see me acting the way I acted in practice, they’re not going to understand it.’ I said to him, ‘That’s great because this is an opportunity. We have 10 hours here to peel back the onion and have you articulate all the things you just articulated to me.’
Will somebody please inform Michael Jeffery Jordan that his status as a board-certified asshole was cemented long before this movie was even developed? I mean, I don’t know. Maybe it was the whole Kwame Brown thing? Or the time he bet on taking an MTV VJ’s virginity? Or perhaps it was when he cheated while playing cards against a teammate’s mother.
Regardless, I have it on pretty good authority that The Last Dance has absolutely no bearing on our opinion of the six-time NBA champion being a dick. If anything, it will just provide us with a deeper understanding of his competitive nature—and finally, explain why all his teammates were walking around with black eyes.
(Updated 3/3/22 with new details)