In order to become the best player of all time, Michael Jordan was willing to be perceived as the worst teammate.
In the highly anticipated documentary “The Last Dance” — focusing on Michael Jordan’s final season with the Bulls (1997-98) — premiering this weekend on ESPN, the six-time NBA champion was asked whether it bothered him that his intensity would impact how fans viewed him as a person.
“Look, winning has a price,” said Jordan, as revealed in The Athletic’s sitdown with director Jason Hehir. “And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates who came after me didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you joined the team, you lived at a certain standard that I played the game. And I wasn’t going to take any less. Now, if that means I had to go in there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates. The one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something that he didn’t f–king do.
“When people see this they are going 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 to win to be a part of that as well. Look, I don’t have to do this. I am only doing it because it is who I am. That’s how I played the game. That was my mentality. If you don’t want to play that way, don’t play that way.”
When Hehir first met Jordan, the legendary guard initially said he wasn’t comfortable participating in the film.
“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,’” Jordan said.
Hehir continued:
“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.”
The season ended with Jordan’s iconic jumper in Utah, clinching the team’s sixth championship in eight years. The next season, Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Phil Jackson were all gone.
Now the 10-hour documentary — produced from more than 10,000 hours of behind-the-scenes footage — shares so much of how the dynasty came to be.