When you’re Michael Jordan, evidently every day is like Game 7 of the NBA Finals, or in this case the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl.
Three of Jordan’s children, Jasmine, Marcus and Jeffrey, appeared Wednesday on The Breakfast Club (h/t CNN’s Ben Church). Marcus recounted one backyard football game with the Hall of Famer that quickly took a turn.
“Jeff was going for a touchdown and, I’ll never forget it, my dad tackled Jeff into a glass table and Jeff hit his head,” he said. “That’s the competitiveness. Obviously, it was an accident.”
Jeffrey required stitches for the injury.
Jordan’s eldest son clarified that MJ’s competitive fire didn’t burn 24/7.
“He definitely could turn it off and be a dad, take us to school, and make sure we got our work done,” Jeffrey said. “But when it was on, it was on.”
The anecdote calls to mind when Chris Paul made a bet with Jordan at a basketball camp. If Jordan failed to complete a shooting drill, all of the campers would receive Jordan Brand shoes. Jordan promptly made all three shots, and a viral meme was born.
The obvious lesson is to never challenge Jordan in anything, ever.
HIS OLDER SISTER had seen it in him as a child. His father and even Red Auerbach had identified it as his career was taking off. Jordan loved to entertain the crowd. His relationship with the audience was growing in ways that those around him struggled to fathom, including the university scholars who had begun to study him as a force in popular culture.
Yet even as he ceded his existence over to the public domain, there remained much that Jordan kept hidden. He did this willfully, out of his growing instinct for self-preservation and his insistence that parts of his life were no one else’s business. Johnny Bach witnessed this with a sense of awe. An intense student of both the game and human nature, Bach was a grand philosopher, blessed with both charm and sincerity. Who knows where the narrative of Michael Jordan and the NBA might have gone had it not been for Bach and their conversations?
