We’re only a few weeks out from the highly anticipated Michael Jordan documentary. “The Last Dance,” which is set to premiere on April 20th, follows the life of Jordan and the Chicago Bulls at the height of their Championship years.
While our knowledge of the program is limited, we know there was a moment during filming that brought the GOAT to tears. At the end of Episode 7, Jordan was asked to elaborate on the tradeoff of being dominant at the game of basketball at the expense of being perceived as a nice guy. It moved him.
(via Richard Deitsch of The Athletic)
“Look, winning has a price,” said Jordan. “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***ing do.”
Jordan’s passion and drive to win often resulted in hurt feelings and battered relationships. At the peak of his powers, he sacrificed his reputation so that he could be the best player possible on the basketball court.
“When people see this they are going to say, ‘Well he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ Well, that’s you. Because you never won anything,” said Jordan. “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.”
It’s during this moment that Jordan apparently asks for a break. The sacrifices he made to become a great basketball player clearly took a toll on him.
What will make this documentary so good is the fact that we’ll get a perspective on MJ we’ve never seen before. We’ll know the man behind the legend.
