When you think about Michael Jordan, the first thing that comes to your mind is how great of a basketball player he was. Jordan won 6 championships, 6 Finals MVPs, 5 MVPs, and a whole lot more in a storied career that has led to many claiming that he is the greatest player of all time.
Pushing basketball aside for a bit, there are a few other things that come to mind when we talk about Jordan. There’s his love for golf which is very well known at this point, but there is one more thing that we always tend to associate with MJ, and that is cigars.
Michael Jordan Once Revealed Who Got Him His Very First Cigar
Jordan and cigars is a combo unlike any other. We’ve seen plenty of images of Jordan smoking a cigar after winning championships, and the regularity with which he smokes has only gone up post-retirement. He was spotted with a cigar in Italy earlier this year, and MJ once revealed during an interview who got him his first cigar back in the day.
Q: “Cigars? We’re sitting here. We’re smoking a Cuban Monty No. 2. Nothing wrong with that. I went through your humidor here; you have a great selection. When did you first get into cigars?”
A: “I smoked my first cigar in 1991, when we won the championship. Up to that point, I had never smoked a cigar, never smoked anything. We won the championship, and Jerry Reinsdorf gave me one of his cigars. He’s a big cigar smoker.”
“The next time I received a cigar was from my good friend, Ahmad Rashad. He used to get these Churchills from Las Vegas that were dipped in rum. I wouldn’t smoke them, but I would sit there and chew on them. I got to the point where it became very relaxing.”
“In Chicago, I tell people this, and they have to understand the context of what happened. We had to be to the stadium at 6 o’clock for home games, and traffic was so bad it would take us an hour and 15 or an hour and 30 minutes to drive. So now I’m sitting in a car for almost an hour and a half, and I’m very tense. I’m worried about the traffic. So I started smoking a cigar going to the games. In 1993, It became a ritual for every home game.”
So there you have it. Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf introduced him to it, and the reason he ultimately got hooked is because of the traffic in Chicago! A world where MJ doesn’t smoke cigars seems quite hard to imagine, but it could have very well turned out that way if not for this series of events.
During this interview, Jordan also revealed that the happiest moment of his career was making the playoffs for the first time. He spoke about how he wanted to change the attitude of fans in Chicago, who had sort of given up on the Bulls, and he sure did that.
