Michael Jordan is widely regarded as the greatest player of all time today, and a big reason for it is those six championships he won with the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. Jordan dominated a decade in a way few others have, but it turns out he was thinking of retiring after winning just one title.
Longtime vice president of Jordan Brand, Howard “H” White, appeared on the Pivot Podcast recently, where he shared a conversation he had with Jordan back in the day.
“This before he ever wins the championship,” White said. “We out in the driveway washing his cars, and he says, ‘You know, H, we win this thing this year, you know, I probably quit.’”
Co-host Ryan Clark asked when Jordan said this, and Howard said it was during the years when the Bulls had those postseason battles with the “Bad Boys” Detroit Pistons.
“He said, ‘Yeah, we win, I probably just quit,'” Howard said. “I said, ‘You give it up?’ [Jordan said], ‘Yeah. Yeah, that’d be enough. If we win it, I got that championship. That’d be enough. I probably give it up.’ Well, obviously that won’t be true. We can see that.”
Imagine if that had happened? NBA history would look so different.
Jordan led the Bulls to their first championship in 1991. They would then go on to three-peat by winning titles in 1992 and 1993 as well.
Notably, Jordan’s Bulls took down Patrick Ewing’s New York Knicks in the 1992 and 1993 playoffs. They also beat Charles Barkley’s Phoenix Suns in the 1993 NBA Finals. Ewing and Barkley have gone down as two of the greatest players never to win a championship, and they probably would have won if he weren’t around.
Jordan then, of course, retired for the first time in 1993 and went off to play baseball. In his absence, Hakeem Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets won the title in 1994. Jordan then came out of retirement in 1995, but the Bulls wouldn’t get to the NBA Finals, and Olajuwon’s Rockets won again.
It was business as usual after that, as Jordan led the Bulls to a second three-peat from 1996 to 1998. This time around, they beat the Seattle SuperSonics in the 1996 NBA Finals and then the Utah Jazz in 1997 and 1998.
The Jazz, of course, were led by Karl Malone and John Stockton, who are also two of the greatest players to have never won a title. They probably would have one to their name, too, if Jordan had just retired in 1991 and never come back.
Getting back to that 1993 retirement, White, who was Jordan’s first sports marketing representative at Nike, shared what the baseball years were like.
“Three championships, leave to play baseball,” White said. “Lord have mercy, sitting up there in them double headers that night. Oh Lord. And he would say he said, ‘I know y’all was asleep up there.’… How he went after that. I mean, literally, he changed his entire weight room into like a baseball workout room.
“But that’s who he is,” White continued. “He’s obsessed with whatever that is… And had they not had that strike, I ain’t sure he would have left.”
That’s another big what-if? What if that 1994-95 Major League Baseball strike never took place? Jordan has said he wouldn’t have returned to basketball if there hadn’t been that strike. It’s a good thing he came back, though. Basketball was ultimately what Jordan was best at, and he and the Bulls were untouchable during that second three-peat.
