Michael Jordan's Confession About His Time In The NBA Left Him In Tears

Fans in any sport will always debate who the GOAT is: the Greatest of All-Time. And in basketball, the name most synonymous with that topic is Michael Jordan. Yes, there have been other great players like LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Wilt Chamberlain, but none of them quite transcended the game like Jordan. He’s a genuine icon — though his brilliance came at a cost, it seems.

Reflecting on the sport in The Last Dance, Jordan was clear about how he played professional basketball. He said, “My mentality was to go out and win, at any cost. If you don’t want to live that regimented mentality, then you don’t need to be alongside of me. Cause I’m going to ridicule you until you get on the same level with me... It’s going to be hell for you.” It was a controversial approach, though one that certainly paid off.

To put his basketball prowess into context, Jordan is the highest scorer in NBA history. His career average of 30.1 points scored per game is the best the league has ever seen. But he wasn’t just an amazing attacking player; he was named defensive player of the year in 1988. On the basketball court, Jordan could do it all. It almost made him seem inhuman.

Jordan was named the league’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) five times. And many believe the only reason he didn’t win more often was because basketball writers felt they couldn’t give it to him every year. Over the course of his career, Jordan was included in 10 All-NBA First Teams, which marked him as one of the top five players in the league for each of those seasons.

The star was lightyears ahead of most other players when it came to championships, too. Jordan won six NBA titles with the Chicago Bulls and was declared MVP in the finals in each of those seasons. Jordan also had an incredible knack for scoring vital points when the pressure was on. This made him the ultimate big-game player.

Everyone remembers the fifth game of the 1997 NBA finals, for instance. Jordan scored a huge 38 points and won the game with a dramatic three-pointer when only 25 seconds remained on the clock. And he did this while suffering from a bad case of the flu, according to The Last Dance. The man was almost superhuman.

But over the years some observers have pointed to a dark undercurrent in Jordan’s career. His need for victory propelled him to incredible heights, but may have caused him to mistreat some people along the way. He has even been branded a bully at times, even if the common narrative has been that his ends justified his means.

Jordan’s level of fame was astronomical when he was at the peak of his powers. And he became such an icon that he actually influenced basketball culture. He was the first player in the NBA to wear baggy shorts during games. This then became the main trend on the courts of both the NBA and cities all over America.

Plus, Jordan was one of the first celebrities to shave his head bald as a fashion statement. As GQ magazine declared in 2015, “Jordan’s head was a thing of beauty. Bald men everywhere should worship him as a god for making the bald head manly and totemic.” Yep, he was a hairless superman whose lack of follicles made him more aerodynamic.

Heck, Jordan was such a superstar that, in the mid-1990s, he quit basketball for a while to try baseball. It was a seemingly insane move, as he was going from the heights of the NBA to the minor leagues of another sport. But he did unexpectedly well, improving hugely over the course of a season. Yet he still chose to return to basketball in 1995 with a two-word statement: “I’m back.”

Jordan’s agent revealed that his client had pursued baseball because it had always been his late father’s dream for him. While he didn’t quite make the Majors, in his eyes Jordan did make his dad proud. After his return to basketball, though, he decided to conquer another world: cinema. And he did it with an iconic cartoon character by his side.

Yes, in 1996, Jordan made the leap to the silver screen alongside... Bugs Bunny. Space Jam, by most estimations, should have been a disaster. Because Jordan had virtually no acting experience, and the technology being used to marry live-action footage and animation was fairly new, and risky, at that.

But no one should have doubted the global pull of Jordan’s stardom. Because Space Jam became a massive hit, making $230 million worldwide at the box office and a further $1 billion in merchandise sales. As director Joe Pytka put it to Entertainment Weekly, the movie’s success came because Jordan, “was a transcendent figure, like Muhammad Ali. He was beyond his sport.”

This brings us to “Air Jordan,” perhaps the best indicator of Jordan’s superstar status. In 1984 he signed the deal that would eventually make him a billionaire. Nope, it wasn’t a Chicago Bulls contract, but rather an endorsement deal with Nike. And together they cooked up the sneaker that would become one of the world’s most enduring footwear products.

Nike was actually a fairly new company at the time, and Jordan was reportedly reluctant to sign with it. The NBA’s official shoe was made by Converse, while Jordan preferred Adidas. Yet Converse refused to prioritize Jordan over other stars, like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and Adidas said it wasn’t in the position to make a custom Jordan shoe.

So Jordan agreed to a meeting with Nike and was sold by the new soles of the shoes. It was dubbed the “air sole.” And Jordan signed a deal worth $500,000 per year, which was triple the amount earned by any other player when it came to deals. His father reportedly told him, straight up, that he would have been a fool to turn it down.

The young company expected to sell $3 million worth of Air Jordans by the end of its fourth year on the market. But by the end of year one, Nike had sold a staggering $126 million. The deal would see Jordan pocket an astonishing $1.3 billion overall. He even made $130 million from the Nike endorsement in 2019, 16 years after he retired from the sport. Of course, the biggest influence on his legacy was his teammates' recollection of Jordan as a player.

Not everyone was looking to sugarcoat his legacy. A few of his teammates, Jud Buechler and Will Perdue, were refreshingly candid with how Jordan’s drill sergeant-meets-schoolyard bully approach made them feel. Buechler confessed, “People were afraid of him. We were his teammates, and we were afraid of him. There was just fear. The fear factor of M.J. was just so, so thick.”

Perdue added, “Let’s not get it wrong... He was a jerk, he crossed the line numerous times.” But Perdue admitted that his view had altered as he has gotten older and more reflective. He said, “But as time goes on and you think back on what he was actually trying to accomplish, yeah, he was a hell of a teammate.”

This complicated legacy meant that, when The Last Dance was initially being put together, Jordan reportedly refused to participate. As director Jason Hehir told The Athletic, the basketball icon was worried about how he would be seen in the documentary. He didn’t think, for example, that his intense treatment of teammate Scott Burrell would be looked upon favorably.

Hehir revealed that Jordan told him, “When you see 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.” Jordan then added, “I needed to know that I could count on him.”

Jordan was scared that when the world saw the footage of him chastising Burrell during practice sessions, they’d just see a bully. He didn’t believe viewers would understand his intention, which was simply to do all that was necessary to win basketball games. The icon did participate in the documentary in the end, of course, where he revealed his opinion of Burrell.

“Scottie Burrell was a talented guy,” clarified Jordan. “What Scottie was lacking was commitment, determination, seriousness. So, he became my guy to keep pushing, keep pushing. I tried to get him to fight me a couple times, just to get him [to think], ‘Man, I’m tired of you picking on me.’ That type of mentality.” Burrell never took that bait, though.

It all begs a simple question, though. How did a “nice guy” like Burrell cope with being in the trenches alongside the mega-demanding Jordan? Did he believe he was being bullied or mistreated in any way? According to Burrell himself in a 2020 interview on The Michael Kay Show, he felt like Jordan’s tactics were just what he needed to excel.

“I appreciated everything [Jordan] did,” revealed Burrell. “He made me a better player, a better person. If you’re an athlete and you resent someone who is challenging you to be a better player, when he’s the best player to ever play, you’re doing the wrong thing. You don’t know what potential you can reach until someone lets you know and pushes you to be even better.”

To Burrell, what Jordan did to him was little more than trash talk that came with the territory. He told ESPN radio, “If you grew up playing in a park, you don’t think people talk junk to you and say things? I said things to people. Just because it was on film, I’m supposed to be embarrassed because [Jordan] said some things to me because of my ego? No.”

Yet this wasn’t the first time Jordan had been accused of using fear to accomplish his goals. In the 2014 book Facing Michael Jordan, Chicago Bulls trainer Tim Grover explained that Jordan actually wanted people to fear him. He said, “I called him a black cat because of the effect he had when he crossed your path. It was not going to be a good thing for you.”

Grover continued, “He would go into the opponents’ locker room before games to talk to someone, and he would just change the dynamic in there. It is a fear and respect thing. He never cared about being liked; he did not need to be friends with everyone all over the league. He did want to be feared and respected, though. That was important.”

This brings us neatly to the closing moments of episode seven of The Last Dance, which featured Jordan confessing about his basketball philosophy. It was an eye-opening and emotional insight into the mind of a man driven beyond the limits of most others to excel. As Jordan put it, “Winning has a price. And leadership has a price.”

Jordan pushed his teammates harder than they had ever been pushed. He revealed, “So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they don’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates came after me. They didn’t endure all the things that I endured.”

The star then freely admitted that he wouldn’t accept anything other than excellence from his teammates. He said, “Once you join the team, you live at a certain standard that I play the game, and I wasn’t gonna take anything less. Now, if that means I have to go out there and get in your [face] a little bit, then I did that.”

So Jordan did confess to being hard on his teammates to get the best out of them. But he rejected the idea that he ever tried to push them harder than he pushed himself. He revealed, “You ask all my teammates, the one thing about Michael Jordan was, he never asked me to do something that he didn’t do.”

Next came Jordan addressing claims that he may have gone too far with his treatment of his teammates. He said, “When people see this, they’re gonna say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ Well, that’s you, because you never won anything.” Therein lies the core of Jordan’s philosophy.

Thus the idea of winning was all-consuming for Jordan. And he believed that, when someone got a taste of winning, it changed their mentality completely. He would therefore do whatever it took to ensure he and his team won championships. He told The Last Dance, “I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well.”

As Jordan’s confession came spilling out of him, he became more and more emotional. His voice cracking, he said, “I don’t have to do this. I’m only doing it because it is who I am. That’s how I played the game. That was my mentality.” It all built to a crescendo with: “If you don’t want to play that, don’t play that way.” He then broke into tears and called for the cameras to be turned off.

Almost a year after The Last Dance aired, director Jason Hehir sat down with The Chicago Tribune to talk about its incredible success. And a huge talking point was Jordan’s tearful moment of introspection. Hehir revealed that the scene happened only an hour into their first interview, and the star needed a full six minutes to compose himself.

Aside from capturing a watercooler moment for the documentary, Hehir felt it gave tremendous insight into Jordan’s personality. He said, “It was illuminating to me that of all the things we discussed, that’s what gets him the most raw. That was him saying, ‘This is who I am.’ And it was a staunch defense of, ‘Like it or not, I brought all these people along with me.’”

And Hehir believes that Jordan, “is well aware that he has the reputation as the most competitive athlete to ever lace it up.” But the director thinks it has left him conflicted. On the one hand, he knows Jordan, “is immensely proud of that and cognizant that that has brought him all the accolades and all the championships and all the achievements in his life.”

But Hehir believes that Jordan also wanted to be seen in a more nuanced way. The director told The Chicago Tribune, “there is also a more human, kinder side to him that he wishes would be examined more deeply as well.” So perhaps Jordan is insecure about people believing he is a one-dimensional, win-at-all-costs dictator. But it’s certainly unlikely he could have played the game any other way... and won.