Episode 5: Traveling Cocaine Circus
As Michael Jordan enters the NBA, we discuss the public perceptions at the time that the NBA of the 80s was full of drugs and how racism played into that. We discuss the role that changing NBA leadership and media technology had on the rise of Michael Jordan’s star power and argue that he was a lucky son of a bitch to have been good at basketball at the exact moment when he was. We also discuss the “traveling cocaine circus” story MJ tells on “The Last Dance”.
Sources:
Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism by Walter LaFeber 2002
Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby 2014
“There’s an Ill Wind Blowing for the NBA” Sports Illustrated 1979
“Buffalo Turns on the Juice, and OJ Simpson Tramples the Pro Football Record Books” People 1975
“Cocaine - Scourge of NBA” Chicago Tribune 1986
“Widespread Cocaine Use by Players Alarms NBA” The Washington Post 1980
“David Stern, Transormative NBA Commissioner, Dies at 77” The New York Times 2020
The Last Dance by ESPN Films and Netflix 2020
Hang Time: Days and Dreams with Michael Jordan by Bob Greene 1992
Transcript:
Intro
Trevor: This podcast contains coarse language literally in the fucking title and may not be appropriate for all listeners.
Guest: Fuck Michael Jordan.
Andrea: Welcome MJ haters and haters-to-be! This is the Fuck Michael Jordan Podcast, the world’s only podcast dedicated to the fact that Michael Jordan is an asshole. Come on and slam…
Trevor: ...and welcome to the jam.
Andrea: I’m Andrea Kelley.
Trevor: And I’m Trevor Kelley
Andrea: And we’re not saying that Michael Jordan is responsible for police brutality against certain populations…
Trevor: But we’re not saying he’s stopped it either.
Andrea: Hello Trevor, welcome to this episode.
Trevor: Oh, thanks. I’ve noticed we started with some less weird energy this time.
Andrea: Yeah, I thought I would start with like a calm voice to just spice up the normal routine.
Trevor: Okay.
Andrea: Like an NPR voice.
Trevor: Right. Oh, NPR.
Andrea: Welcome to Not Fresh Air and I am your host, Not Terry Gross.
Trevor: And I am Terry Tasty.
Andrea: I listen to more NPR than you, but you somehow do a better voice, so it evens out.
Trevor: I have my powers.
Andrea: How are you doing?
Trevor: Good, how are you?
Andrea: Good, good. We ready to learn some Michael Jordan things?
Trevor: Uh, I think so. I think I’m ready.
Andrea: Excellent. You got your drink?
Trevor: Oh, it’s here.
Andrea: Okay. Listeners, you got your drinks?
Trevor: They’ve got ‘em.
Andrea: We’ll wait.
Trevor: I can see. Did you hear me crack my knuckles?
Andrea: I don’t know if that one picked up or not.
Trevor: That was like a weird…like an oddly threatening…
Andrea: You got your drinks?
Trevor: You got your drink? [cracking noise]
Andrea: All right, because we do not talk about Michael Jordan sober. Especially this episode…
Trevor: Neither does he.
Andrea; Yeah, exactly.
Trevor: You saw the documentary.
Andrea: We did.
Trevor: The varying levels of whiskey in the glass.
Andrea: It was tequila, actually.
Trevor: Oh, fun!
Andrea: Mmhmm, yeah.
Trevor: Much more sober a drink.
Andrea: I don’t know.
Trevor: Much more sobering.
Andrea: It’s dark because it’s one of those really good tequilas that’s barrel-aged.
Trevor: I actually kind of want it. I wonder what it is.
Andrea: It’s like a thousand dollars a bottle. I have looked up what Michael Jordan was drinking in the documentary.
Trevor: You’re pretty cool.
Andrea: I am pretty cool.
Trevor: No, I like it, though.
Andrea: Um, but yeah, this is especially the episode to not be sober for, because we’re talking about the NBA in the 80s.
Trevor: Oh shit! Hold on. [drinks]
Andrea: I’ve titled this episode “Traveling Cocaine Circus” after the Bulls in the 80s. Some article at the time called the team by that name, but the phrase has recently become famous after coming up in “The Last Dance” documentary. We’ll go over Michael Jordan’s self-righteous cocaine story in ‘The Last Dance” later this episode.
Trevor: Oh man, the disputations!
Andrea: The disputations. We’re going to be discussing the sorry state that the NBA and specifically the Chicago Bulls were in when Michael Jordan entered the league. We’ll also discuss sports marketing and media during this era to get a better understanding of the world that would facilitate Jordan’s unprecedented rise in stardom.
Trevor: So basically what happened, you’re saying is everybody leveled up and figured it out?
Andrea: Kind of, yeah.
Trevor: Like marketing-wise?
Andrea: Yes, we’re going to get into this nice and deep. You may ask, why is this important?
Trevor: Why is this important?
Andrea: You may ask, what does it have to do with Michael Jordan being an asshole?
Trevor: What does this have…no, probably something.
Andrea: Probably most things have to do with Michael Jordan being an asshole.
Trevor: I would never ask that.
Andrea: Yeah, well we’re going to get into that over the next 40 minutes or so, but…
Trevor: I’m happy to be your question asker.
Andrea: The general thesis of this episode is that Michael Jordan was extraordinarily lucky to have entered the NBA at the exact time that he did. Yeah, Michael Jordan is good at basketball…so they allege.
Trevor: I mean, I’ve heard that.
Andrea: Yeah.
Trevor: I’ve seen a lot of evidence.
Andrea: There is a lot of evidence.
Trevor: There’s a lot of statistical evidence, but what do I feel?
Andrea: Right, right. So yeah, he’s good at basketball, nobone’s arguing that. But at the same time, I would argue that a huge reason that Michael Jordan is universally seen as the GOAT is a pure timing kind of thing that he had no control over. Just got lucky on.
Trevor: Just like a shooting star kind of thing.
Andrea: Yeah, like, if, say, Wilt Chamberlain or Oscar Robertson or Bill Russell had started playing pro-ball in the late 80s, instead of back when public perception of professional basketball was not as ideal, they would be the Michael Jordan of basketball...except for the phrase “the Michael Jordan of” would be “the Bill Russell of” or….
Trevor: I was gonna…“the Wilt Chamberlain of…” or whatever.
Andrea: Right, right.
Trevor: Sure.
Andrea: Michael Jordan was the best basketball player who was able to fit into the image that the league needed at a specific time when the business-side of basketball was making major changes. And that’s why he is the icon that he is. It’s one of those old history arguments, maybe. Like how do individuals shape the world versus how much does the world shape the individual. Like, was there something special about Hitler that he became you know, Hitler?
Trevor: Nature versus nurture.
Andrea: Or would Germany in the same political/economic climate or whatever have rallied behind some other facist dictator if it had, you know…
Trevor: RIght, yeah, would Lebron have raided all of the known world if he were the son of a Khan? You know…
Andrea: Right, it’s just…yeah, you can’t really say exactly, so yeah, would the state of the NBA in the late 80s/early 90s have churned out a different GOAT if MJ didn’t exist? We’re not going to definitively answer these big philosophical questions.
Trevor: But yes.
Andrea: But yes.
Trevor: Abso-fucking-lutely.
Andrea: Well, and I know that this podcast…people come to us for our deep philosophic…
Trevor: Yeah, I mean, you’re widely regarded especially in the, um, the far, um, reaches, of philosphy. I clearly know a lot about philosophy.
Andrea: The far reaches is the deepest part, so…
Trevor: I mean, I’ve had brief contact with the far reaches of philosophy and it’s through you.
Andrea: Good. So yeah, we’re going to examine how Michael Jordan was able to rise to the level of fame and fortune that he did, and I hope that it takes a little bit of air out of the tires of the Air Jordan success story.
Trevor; Hm, a little less air, a little more Jordan.
Andrea: A little, a little…sure. And yes, we’ll talk about cocaine.
Trevor: Oh god. It’s so overrated.
Andrea: I…yeah.
Trevor: We’ll just gloss on over that.
Andrea: I haven’t done coke. We will not discuss whether Trevor has or not.
Trevor: It was…you know, we’ve had some wild years.
Andrea: We don’t actually have any confirmable stories of MJ doing coke, either, I’m sorry to say. But the ol’ booger sugar was still a…
Trevor: Wait, I’ve never heard that.
Andrea: It’s the best term for cocaine that there is!
Trevor: The ol’ booger sugar! I thought you were talking about Booger on fucking, on TNT.
Andrea: What?
Trevor: The commentator, uh Booger…McKnight? Is that his name?
Andrea: Yeah? I don’t know.
Trevor: Hold on.
Andrea: Okay.
Trevor: He’s a real person, I swear to god. He really is real. People…NBA fans will know exactly who I’m talking about. Booger McFarland, is that? No, that’s…They call him Booger, he’s one of the worst commentators in sports and he’s so great.
Andrea: Okay.
Trevor. Anyways, okay.
Andrea; So this has nothing to do with him. So I hope you appreciated the diversion.
Trevor: I’ll probably cut the entire joke and explanation. Or leave it in because I always leave everything in that I say I’ll…
Andrea: It’s always like “oh cut that…ehh.”
Trevor: Eh, too much work.
Andrea: But yeah, booger sugar. Cocaine. I think I only wrote the phrase “booger sugar” once in my script. But I’m going to use it more, now that it’s become a thing.
Trevor: Yeah, I’m looking for excuses now.
Andrea: But yeah, it was a serious factor in the public perception of the NBA at the time that Michael Jordan was drafted into the league.
Trevor: Okay.
Public Perception of the NBA
Andrea: The NBA was in trouble when MJ joined in 1984. The American Basketball Association, had been absorbed by the NBA eight years earlier to avoid going completely under. Many franchises were losing more money than they were making, and both tv viewership and live game attendance were significantly down. A team official of the struggling ABA team in Dallas blamed race for their troubles, saying “Whites in Dallas are simply not interested in paying to see an all-black team and the black population alone cannot support us.”
Trevor: Oof.
Andrea: Another team official at the time is quoted as saying “It’s just difficult to get a lot of people to watch huge, intelligent, millionaire black people on television.” Which, like...“huge, intelligent, millionaire black person” sounds like my #1 sexual fantasy, but I suppose white guys in the 70s may not agree.
Trevor: They were offended. Pornography was not yet, uh…I actually have no idea why I mentioned pornography. But it’s a disease.
Andrea: College basketball was killing NBA in television ratings through much of the 70s, and there are a number of factors that could explain this, but race does seem to be one of them. College teams tended to be whiter than most NBA teams. Most people weren’t straight up saying, “I don’t want to watch a black sport”, but there was a lot of like coded language around it. People calling basketball a “city sport” or even a “ghetto sport”, for example.
Trevor: Ah, okay, that, like, oh god, it’s always like camoflagued, the stuff we’re talking about.
Andrea: Yeah. Al Attles was the black coach of the Warriors in 1979 and he explained it saying, "A lot of people use the word 'undisciplined' to describe the NBA. I think that word is pointed at a group more than at a sport. What do they mean by it? On the court? Off the court? What kind of clothes a guy wears? How he talks? How he plays? I think that's a cop-out."
Trevor: Yeah, like what are they supposed to fold a fucking flag every game? Like in military fashion? That’s dumb.
Andrea: No. It’s coded racism.
Trevor: Yeah, it really is.
Andrea: But yeah, this perception that NBA athletes were undisciplined ghetto kids did kind of help out Michael Jordan, though. Obviously Michael Jordan’s black, but his upbringing didn’t fit the stereotype. He came from a middle-class two-parent household in Wilmington, North Carolina. And discipline was one of his defining characteristics, so he kind of, almost played into the “oh everyone else is undisciplined” thing. Where he could have been like “oh, this is a stereotype people are fucking us up on,” you know, he was like “no, I’m not like that. They are like that.” was kind of the Michael Jordan…
Trevor: It’s hard to say whether that’s like a good or a bad thing, you know, by playing into the stereotype…but he also broke it though, eventually.
Andrea: Yeah, so he broke the…
Trevor: No, that’s not true. It’s not broken even today, like there are people that would say the same thing.
Andrea: No, there’s still, yeah, a stereotype there, but yeah, Michael Jordan was definitely like…and I mean, he was straight-up a disciplined person, I’m not going that he was…
Trevor: Oh yeah, you can’t dispute that.
Andrea: But yeah, he was the perfect face to put in front of white America to make black basketball players more palatable in general. Scheduling seemed to be an issue in the NBA’s appeal as well. A 1979 Sports Illustrated article ominously titled “There’s an Ill Wind Blowing for the NBA”.
Trevor: Ha, an ill wind!
Andrea: I like it because nowadays you can say ill like it’s “that’s an ill wind, bro!”
Trevor: Right, but if you were from the 1600s you would have read that as a fart.
Andrea: There’s an ill wind blowing in the NBA, just ask Paul Pierce.
Trevor: I say, Paul Pierce, that’s an ill wind you have there, my man.
Andrea: Anyway, this article explained the issue quote: “For the past three seasons, the NBA schedule has had each team playing almost every other team four times. Thankfully, this will be changed next season, when each team will play 60 games within its conference, but for now, traditional rivalries are meaningless. There is no drama, no continuity, nothing for the fan to get up for, as he did in the days when Russell and Chamberlain, or West and Robertson, would go at each other some 10 times a season. The NBA is just a series of one-night stands strung out across the country.”
Trevor: Ah, isn’t that…you could say the same thing about my life.
Andrea: A series of one-night stands strung out arcross the country? Your life is very different than I thought it was.
Trevor: Andrea, you’re most of those one-night stands.
Andrea: Oh, thank you!
Trevor: You’ve got a really good record, it’s like, several thousand days in a row.
Andrea: Of one-night stands with your wife?
Trevor: Yeah
Andrea: Excellent. This was a short term issue just during the first few years after the merger, but it was right before the Michael Jordan years. MJ showed up just as the league was figuring out how to market its stars and its rivalries again. Because there were just like some weird years when scheduling was weird and nobody knew who their rivals were and stuff, right after than ABA/NBA merger.
Trevor: I can see how that would happen. Like if, um, let’s say the AFC and the NFC in the NFL were to merge, there’d be a lot of questions. You know? If they’re in the same division for whatever reason…I don’t know why that would happen, but if they became the same entity, it would be like “well who’s our rival now?”
Andrea: Right.
Trevor: Do we retain our same rival? Are we still….you know…
Andrea: Well, and at this point in the NBA, every team was playing every team an equal amount. So like nowadays you play within your conference and within your division more games.
Trevor: Okay, okay, I see, I see. But that encourages…dude, these were a lot of really good marketing decisions that were being made right here. They were like “Our sport kind of sucks; it’s kind of boring. How do we amp it up?”
Andrea: Yeah, well we’ll get to learn more here. Yeah, so like, I hadn’t really realized when, for example, when watching The Last Dance and they’re talking about MJs rivalry with the Detroit Pistons, those teams were typically playing each other six times in the normal season.
Trevor: Oh man, that’s beautiful.
Andrea: Before they even met in playoffs. So…
Trevor: That’s fun, too, because they have a much larger influence on them getting into the playoffs. You know? It’s like “ah, the fucking Pistons kept us out of playoffs this year…”
Andrea: So nowadays there’s 30 teams in the NBA and you only play another team at most four times pre-playoffs, but MJ hit kind of this sweet spot where the NBA was small enough and smart enough to have these really good rivalry storylines, scheduling-wise.
Trevor: Right, you had Celtics/Sixers, I think? You had Sonics, uh…well, fucking Jazz/Rockets, because we knocked them out of the playoffs. Ah man, good stuff. Vice versa, too.
Andrea: Yeah, yeah, it was a good time for the NBA. Perhaps the NBA had marketed its stars better pre-merger, but even then, endorsement deals that made money directly for those stars instead of just selling games themselves were pretty few and far between. Oscar Robertson, who played from 1960-74, and stats-wise is one of greatest basketball player of all time (he only won one championship, but he was the first NBA player to ever average a triple-double in a season).
Trevor: Which is nuts.
Andrea: Among other things, yeah. I think down the line I want to do some episodes on other GOAT contenders and we’ll definitely talk about him more.
Trevor: Yeah, that’d be really fun. Talk about Bill Russell and Kareem and Magic, etc. etc.
Andrea: Yeah. Robertson had a stellar reputation off-court as well, but advertisers at that time didn't believe America would accept a black spokesperson. He was not offered a single product endorsement until after he’d been playing for four years, and then it was just to endorse a basketball.
Trevor: Oh, wow.
Andrea: So there was no like “oh, drink Gatorade, Oscar Robertson drinks Gatorade.” It was just a little bit too early as far as like…racism goes…yeah. The world was changing, though. The old-school racists were dying out somewhat, but more importantly, corporate America realized that if marketed correctly, black spokespeople could be successful. Bill Cosby was successfully slinging Jell-O and Coca-Cola throughout the 70s.
Trevor: Slinging Jell-O. Oh boy.
Andrea: Eh, I didn’t want to think about that as a….
Trevor: God, okay…
Andrea: And a black athlete was proving to be an effective endorser in a huge Hertz marketing campaign. Do you know who I’m talking about?
Trevor: No.
Andrea: OJ Simpson.
Trevor: Oh shit!
Andrea: In a 1975 profile, People magazine describes Simpson’s appeal versus other black athletes, saying “Muhammad Ali’s face reflects clownish threat; Jim Brown is Menace incarnate. They might be called negative superstars. On the other hand, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron have lacked the wit or personality to scale the media heights; they are simply superathletes. O.J. Simpson is the first black athlete to become a bona fide lovable media superstar.”
Trevor: Try on our gloves!
Andrea: So that’s aged well.
Trevor: Jim Brown was death incarnate. But OJ Simpson would never kill anybody.
Andrea: That’s the thing, like, Muhammad Ali is like so much of a better person, but they’re like “he’s a threat.”
Trevor: He’s a threat! He didn’t go to Vietnam! Jesus Christ.
Andrea: MJ and OJ were both good-looking and had a certain charm, but more importantly, they didn’t act “too black”. They both enjoyed white guy activities like playing golf…
Trevor: That was in quotes, right?
Andrea: Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah….”too black” you can’t see my air quotes, but they’re there.
Trevor: Just clarifying: not our view.
Andrea: Exactly, no this is the view of advertising executives.
Trevor: The view of the time.
Andrea: Uh, they both enjoyed white guy activities like playing golf, identifying more with corporations than people, and getting away with murder.
Trevor: Jesus. All right.
Andrea: Okay,so maybe the murder thing is just an OJ thing.
Trevor: We’re looking at you Michael, where’s your dad, bud?
Andrea: He didn’t kill his dad.
Trevor: Oh, I didn’t accuse him of anything, I’m just asking where he was.
Andrea: And like, I do think MJ would enjoy getting away with murder.
Trevor: He just looks like it!
Andrea: I’m not saying he looks like it, I’m just saying he really likes winning.
Trevor: I’m just saying the faces he makes when he wins make me think he’d like to get away with murder.
Andrea: And there are unsolved murders out there. Just saying.
Trevor: That’s true! They’re out there! Just like most dogs are dead, lot of unsolved murders.
Andrea: A lot of unsolved murders exist. You do the math.
Trevor: Mmhmm, you do the math.
Andrea: Michael Jordan, especially in his early years, had a very clean image that was palatable to advertisers. And that clean image was essential because the other thing the NBA had going on as MJ entered the league was a cocaine problem. In a 1986 Chicago Tribune article, Jordan said ''I am conscious of my image. I am a respectable young man. I don`t drink, I don`t do drugs or any of that stuff and carry on till all hours of the night.”
Trevor: He then downed the rest of his tequila and finished the documentary, signing “Love, Michael Jordan.”
Andrea: This was in 1986, Jordan would continue, “I realize I have a certain responsibility. It’s not easy at times because you have to watch yourself. But I wouldn’t want it any other way.” This image was crucial when it came to his endorsement deals. And it does seem to be at least moderately true, at least in the earlier years of his career, at least compared to other NBA players...
Trevor: Right.
Andrea: Like, MJ had his vices, for sure, but they were generally underwraps. He had a gambling problem from the get-go and he did drink a fair amount later in his career, and plenty has come out about him philandering with women and all that kind of thing, but there really isn’t anything reliable that has him as a drug user, at least.
Trevor: No charges or anything either, and no…
Andrea: Not even any really good stories or you know…
Trevor: Yeah.
Andrea: It seems pretty…I don’t think MJ ever really dabbled in drugs.
Trevor: We’re not saying MJ didn’t try cocaine, we’re just saying, he probably did do it.
Andrea: Right. Four years before Michael Jordan would join the league, the LA Times ran an article titled “Widespread Cocaine Use By Players Alarms NBA”, that estimated a whopping 40 to 75% of NBA players used cocaine. Which, I know is kind a big spread…
Trevor: Yeah, that’s a huge spread. It could be anywhere from 1 to 95%!
Andrea: But even at the low end, it’s saying 40% which is high enough that that shocked the average American.
Trevor: Yeah. But you know what, I don’t think it would shock any of us today.
Andrea: Yeah, well, today they drug test athletes and stuff…
Trevor: You’re right, I’m thinking again of the NFL. Actually, NBA athletes these days are typically, at least on the outside, pretty upstart. They are really focused on being positive role models a lot more. Much credit to Adam Sliver, in my opinion.
Andrea: I agree. Yeah, and well I think they’ve just realized now that…I mean, every team has their chefs and their psychologists and like they’re just creating a better player. They’re realizing that all these things matter; you’re going to win more if you don’t have a bunch of drug addicts on your team, etc.
Trevor; Yeah, right.
Andrea: My favorite quote from the cocaine article comes from Bob Ferry, the clueless general manager of the Washington Bullets at the time. He says, “I really wouldn't know what to look for in terms of symptoms. Unless a guy was really messed up. I wouldn't recognize it. I haven't had any feelings or indications that any of our players uses it, but it is popular and I guess it's possible someone is.” So he’s an oblivious doofus. But I also can relate to him. I worked in the service industry for many years completely ignorant of how many of my coworkers were doing coke.
Trevor: That’s what I was going to say, like I guarantee you, more than double the amount of people you think have used cocaine have in your life.
Andrea: I still cringe, I remember this time I went to this birthday party at a bar with some coworkers and some of the girls all went to the bathroom together and all went in the same stall and I don’t know, I was kind of drunk, but I’m like “Oh, I’ll join you, I guess we’re all peeing in front of each other like friends do,”
Trevor: Oh you sweet…
Andrea: It was a weird awkward bathroom stall hangout until I left. Everyone went to the bathroom again without me shortly afterward and I’m just like “Weird, we all just went.” And it wasn’t until days later I realized “Oh, that was to do drugs and I cramped their style.”
Trevor: Honestly, this is the most you story that I’ve ever heard. I love it.
Andrea: So yeah, I feel you, Bob Ferry.
Trevor: You’re a beautiful person.
Andrea: Thank you.
Trevor: God bless people like you.
Andrea: But regardless, plenty of not-clueless people close to the NBA were aware that cocaine was an issue, and a series of drug scandals brought it more into the public eye. The 1980 death of Terry Furlow was a wakeup call to some. The 25-year-old Utah Jazz player was found to have coke and Valium in his system after he died wrapping his car around a utility pole.
Trevor: Yeah, oof.
Andrea: Kind of rough. In kind of the 70s and a little bit into the 80s, cocaine had been seen as generally harmless. Nixon’s war on drugs had focused really on the drugs dirty hippies do, you know, weed and acid.
Trevor: Those dirty hippies.
Andrea: The drugs Wall Street bankers do are fine.
Trevor: Makes us money. Ah, capitalism.
Andrea: Right. But now that it’s black men doing cocaine it…black people are incarcerated for drug crimes at five times the rate of white people even though they do the same number of drugs, because America’s a fucked up. So anyway, people in the NBA doing cocaine was a problem.
Trevor: Right, because white people decided it was.
Andrea: Yep. The question as far as the NBA was concerned was just “how do we get people to stop thinking of players as overpaid junkies and instead buy basketball tickets?”. Stan Albeck, the Bulls coach for MJ’s second season, dealt with a bunch of player cocaine scandals really as his mediocre coaching talent bounced him around the league. He expressed frustration about how much drug use drove the narrative, saying “The thing is, I don’t know if there is an answer to drugs. Our league has done something to fight the problem, and it brings about media attention, but it’s correct to take a stand. We want a drug-free league, and so does the public. The public is fed up with reading about drugs when they want to read about the games. I get tired of being asked.” In 1983, the NBA instituted a policy of regular drug-testing. It was the first major sports league to do so. Michael Jordan was in the very first NBA draft class to come in after this policy. This policy may have led to him being more cautious about getting involved in drugs than his predecessors. It also just put him in a prime position to be the first star player to not be associated with that drug-riddled reputation.
David Stern
Andrea: Michael Jordan joined the NBA the same year a new sheriff arrived in town. David Stern became NBA Commissioner 1984.
Trevor: Booo, sorry, just following tradition.
Andrea: Booing the commisioner.
Trevor: Well, David Stern was one of the most booed commissioners of all time, so yeah.
Andrea: Fair enough.
Trevor: NBA fans will appreciate that.
Andrea: Decisions he would make about the marketing of the league and the rights of players would have a massive impact on Jordan’s career trajectory. A year later, the Bulls were bought by Jerry Reinsdorf, so MJ’s career would almost entirely be under new leadership that was looking to market things differently than the struggling past. New commissioner, new owner, all that jazz. Both Stern and Reinsdorf felt that the best way to market the league and the team was to promote star players. This may seem easy enough, but recent years had struggled to do it . Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were the biggest stars when MJ came in, but their battles had mostly been marketed as a Celtics/Lakers rivalry, which wasn’t particularly compelling if you didn’t live in Boston or Los Angeles. David Stern understood that this wasn’t working, and was pushing for new stars to become the face of the NBA. The veteran players were already kind of tainted with the rough years. Obviously, Magic Johnson would still play for plenty of years and still be a star, but he was never treated like the television draw that he might have been.
Trevor: Yeah.
Andrea: If he had just been promoted correctly, yeah.
Trevor: Right, no, yeah, he literally was very much a Michael-Jordan-caliber player.
Andrea: Mhm, the Finals series in 1980 against Philadelphia was played on tape delay at midnight in most parts of the country. Like, this was Magic Johnson versus Julius Erving, like, could have been a big deal. But just nobody was…
Trevor: God, you had to be such a fan back then. You know? You had to be a die-hard fan to watch this shit.
Andrea: Yeah, your average American just wasn’t watching a lot of NBA. This would change dramatically under Stern’s leadership. Another big impact David Stern would have on the NBA was changes in free agency rules that would lead to players having more power about where they play. And how much money they could ask for to go to a team. When Stern died earlier this year, Charles Barkley said “When I got to the NBA in 1984 [Commissioner’s first year, Jordan’s first year, also Charles Barkley’s first year], the average salary was $250,000. It’s almost $9 million now. And he is largely responsible for that.” My first instinct was that inflation was actually responsible for that, but I ran that through a calculatoer and $250,000 in 1984, is equivalent to a little over $600,000 in today’s money.
Trevor: Yeah, I was going to say, it’s not that big.
Andrea: So yeah, $600,000 would be a disrespectful salary in today’s NBA.
Trevor: Yeah, you’d be…that’s the kind of shit like Jonas Jerebko makes. Actually, no, he makes like one, he makes like one or two.
Andrea: Yeah, I’m sure he makes at least a million. You’re “oh, we pulled you up from the G League for like a few games”, you’re making $600,000.
Trevor: Like David Stockton.
Andrea: Yeah.
Trevor: Hey, but he made 600 grand, good for him.
Andrea: Yeah, or whatever. Or, if you’re in the WNBA, that’s like five times the amount of the highest paid player.
Trevor: Oof, big oof.
Andrea: Little bit of a gap there.
Trevor: Yeah, same reasons, too, not same reasons but like…well, there’s a lot more sexism, but I wonder if like…
Andrea: If the sexism of how people view WNBA now is maybe how the racism of how people viewed the NBA in the past.
Trevor: Yes, exactly, like could you see the WNBA following a similar trajectory as the NBA and then eventually become…
Andrea: Yeah, if they learned to market it the right way and then…
Trevor: Not that it’s their fault for not marketing it right.
Andrea: No, I’m not blaming anybody, it’s just the right business mind could make the WNBA a big ticket, I think.
Trevor: Right. Mark Cuban, looking at you, bud.
Andrea: Buy the WNBA.
Trevor: You know who we need to run the WNBA? A man. Oh my god, I apologize to everyone. I’m so sorry.
Andrea: Michael Jordan’s NBA salary would always be small compared to the money he was making off Nike and other endorsement deals, but the dramatic increase in NBA salaries that would happen during the David Stern years is an indication of a general trend toward players having more power in comparison to the team organization, and MJ would certainly benefit from being on the first wave of that trend.
Trevor: Ooo, and that was kind of illustrated in The Last Dance in the struggle between Jerry Krause and Michael Jordan of “oh well players, not organizations win championships” right? This was sort of the build-up for that, in a way.
Andrea: It was definitely a power struggle, but giving the players more power ended up making the NBA better, so…
Trevor: Go figure. It’s almost like if you give power to the wage-earners it’s going to be a better environment.
Andrea: Right. The NBA expanded rapidly during the first decade or so of David Stern’s tenure as commissioner. It had already been slowly growing; the ABA-NBA merger in ‘76 had expanded the NBA by four teams to bring the total number to 22. But by the time Michael Jordan won his last championship, the number of teams was up to 27. MJ’s peak years happened right alongside this expansion. And as more people had their local teams to root for, more people naturally had more interest in the top NBA player, as well. I realize that I said earlier that a small number of teams was beneficial to MJ and now I’m saying adding more teams was also beneficial, but I don’t think that’s really contradictory.
Trevor: No, more money is always better.
Andrea: Right, well he was in this sweet spot. He became a big name in the league when things were smaller and then he was already the face of the sport as things expanded. So he benefited from both sides of that coin really.
Trevor: Arguably the magnifying glass of that situation, you know? Focusing the sun beam, you know and creating more heat that way, metaphorically-speaking.
Andrea: Indeed. Outside of the US, David Stern also had a strong focus on marketing the NBA globally. During his first few years, the NBA, which had previously only played a handful of games outside the country, would start regularly having a few games a year played in Europe, Asia, or Latin America, like they still do today. David Stern and modern technology joined forces to escalate the number of NBA broadcasts around the world. In 1986, 35 countries would be able to view an NBA game at least weekly. A decade later, that would rise to 175 countries. Michael Jordan was the best player in the league during this period of growth. International fans getting into an American sport for the first time more often than not became Chicago Bulls fans.
Trevor: Right, it’s just like when American’s get into soccer, we’re all the fans of Brazil. You know what I mean, they’re like…
Andrea: They’re good.
Trevor: Oh, fucking Ronaldo.
Andrea: Michael Jordan was also very lucky to have been a star in the NBA the first year that professional players were allowed to compete in the Olympics. The 1992 Dream Team was so good and marketed so well, that people across the world who hadn’t previously given a shit about basketball, were suddenly lifelong Jordan fans.
Trevor: That’s literally what got me so into basketball, was the Dream Team, dude.
Andrea: And that’s true of literally millions of people.
Trevor: Yeah, I’m no different. I’m just old so I can be like “I’ve been a fan of basketball forever”. But the fact of the matter is, it was the Dream Team, dude it sounds cool! The Dream Team.
Andrea: Yeah, Dream Team, And they had their cool uniforms and…
Trevor: It’s almost like a descriptor now.
Andrea: And they were so good because at the time, basketball players were so much better in the US. That’s kind of changed because of the Dream Team again because people are like “oh, basketball can be really cool,” and suddenly the world’s into it. It’s a hard thing to measure, but basketball is probably the second or third most popular sport in the world. It’s…NFL hasn’t been able to spread like that, hockey hasn’t been able to spread like that, you know, American sports or sports from this part of the country…even baseball, it’s spread, but it’s kind of a split fan-base with cricket ad whatever.
Trevor: Yeah.
Andrea: The growing popularity of the NBA and Jordan in particular was a symptom of the bigger cultural change happening in the US and around the world. America had just come out on top of the Cold War and it was time for the world to celebrate by eating McDonalds and wearing their Air Jordans.
Trevor: Yeah, we won the Cold War!
Andrea: Capitalism!
Trevor: Let’s get fucking cheeseburgers, baby.
Andrea: But like really, it was kind of that era of like “American capitalism won and let’s buy American products!’ like all around the fucking world. And boy, would it make Michael Jordan a rich man. And boy would I like to hear a word from our sponsors about now! How about you?
Trevor: Oh, sure.
Andrea: All right. On the other side of the break, we’ll be talking about media technology and the impact it had on MJ’s career, and we’ll talk about the Chicago Bulls pre-Michael Jordan aka The Traveling Cocaine Circus. But now, a word from our sponsors.
[commercial break]
Media Technology
Andrea: Back from a word from our sponsors! Specialized TV was seeing an explosion during the same time period. The year MJ joined the NBA, US congress passed a bill loosening restrictions on cable channels. The cable industry invested $15 Billion over the next several years getting wired into millions of American homes. Almost any cable station you can name (MTV, Comedy Central, CNN, whatever) was founded during the rise of Michael Jordan.
Trevor: Huh, is that like causation or is that correlation?
Andrea: No, Michael Jordan founded every single cable company.
Trevor: Okay, just making sure. So there we go, folks at home, put your tinfoil hats on.
Andrea: Most importantly for us, ESPN was founded in 1979. Michael Jordan was built for the world of 24-hour sports coverage, with his flashy dunks and impressive scoring stats. People in parts of the country who would never have had access to a full Chicago game were now at least seeing big plays from Michael Jordan regularly on SportsCenter. The 80s saw the number of Americans who had access to cable grow from 16 million to 53 million.
Trevor: Wow.
Andrea: It’s a huge explosion.
Trevor: Four times…more than four…yeah, 4.2 times or something…that’s incredible. 420% growth..
Andrea: Yeah. But this phenomenon was not just unique to the United States, too. American television was spreading to other countries.
Trevor: Like a disease.
Andrea: I mean, in some respects, yeah…Michael Jordan spread throughout the world like coronavirus.
Trevor: Michael-18? Mike-vid?
Andrea: Well, 19 comes from the year, so it would be like Michael…
Trevor: So like Mike-vid-87? Mike-vid-86?
Andrea: Whatever. This is dumb.
Trevor; Good joke.
Andrea: Solid, C-minus joke.
Trevor: Good joke, me.
Andrea: We talked about David Stern pushing the NBA into more countries, and this would not have been possible without the technology that was rapidly progressing at the time. Direct Broadcast Satellite was first launched in ‘74, and over time, more and more people around the world were watching non-local sports. And all of these technologies for cable and satellite TV were funded through our dear friend advertising. The number of television ads that Americans were exposed to nearly doubled from 1980 to 1990. People who never saw Michael Jordan in a ball game, knew him from the commercials.
Trevor: Wow, that’s crazy.
Andrea: Which is true…I mean, there are tons of people that I know that would never give a shit about basketball, but everybody knows who Michael Jordan is because they saw him…
Trevor: Right, think of the McDonald’s commercial, “I wanna be like Mike. I wanna be like Mike.”
Andrea: …doing Nike and McDonald’s and Gatorade.
Trevor: There’s tons of things like that.
Andrea: The culture around sports had never been this big and homogenous. Obviously there have been passionate sports fans since the beginning of human culture, but it was often fragmented, with people cheering for the teams and sports that were popular in their local area. And today, it’s again kind of fragmented again where anybody can watch whatever niche thing they want through the internet. But there was a time period in the 80s and 90s when massive cable companies had a huge chunk of the world all watching the same games, the same commercials. The NBA and Michael Jordan took full advantage of that world To this day, it’s not weird to see somebody in Germany or the Philippines or Brazil wearing a #23 Bulls jersey and it has just as much to do with technology as it does about MJ’s basketball talent.
Chicago Bulls
Andrea: But let’s talk about the Bulls specifically, now!
Trevor: Ohhh.
Andrea: Unless you don’t want to?
Trevor: I…
Andrea: Let’s end the podcast!
Trevor: Let’s stop the podcast forever! Sound of a gunshot. How did they publish it?
Andrea: Did you, did you shoot the podcast?
Trevor: No, I…I think I did. It’ll live.
Andrea: It’ll live. It’s got legs.Ugh, I don’t know why I said that.
Trevor: That’s fine.
Andrea: That’s fine. The Bulls pre-Michael Jordan were the sad younger brother of other Chicago sports franchises.The Bears were doing well in football, it was the Ditka years.
Trevor: Da Bears…
Andrea: The White Sox and Blackhawks were doing decent in baseball and hockey.
Trevor: Yeah, that’s true.
Andrea: The Cubs were still kind of garbage, but they at least had a passionate historic fanbase. And few in Chicago had a passion for the Bulls.
Trevor: Isn’t that always the case with baseball? I feel like baseball fans are fans of baseball out of just pure stubbornness.
Andrea: Oh, if you love baseball, you hate yourself. It’s just built into the game.
Trevor: Oh, I kind of want to look into it a little more.
Andrea: I actually think we should get into baseball more than we have.
Trevor: I hate it, though.
Andrea: It’ll be fun. It’ll be fun.
Trevor: No. All right, fine.
Andrea: It’s fine. The Chicago Coliseum, where the Bulls played was typically only a third full for Bulls games.
Trevor: Wow.
Andrea: It was not…they were not doing well. The three respective seasons prior to MJ’s arrival, the Bulls had won 34, 28, and 27 games.
Trevor: Jesus, those are literally tanking seasons.
Andrea: For any listeners that don’t know, an NBA season has 82 games, so these records are, technically-speaking, dog shit.
Trevor: Losing records.
Andrea: They’re dog shit records.
Trevor: Yeah.
Andrea: The Bulls’ star player pre-Michael Jordan was Orlando Woolridge. If you’re asking, “who?”, yeah, he was the star. Woolridge would later be suspended the 87/88 season for violating drug policy. Their first-round draft pick in 1982 was a shooting guard named Quintin Dailey, and if you’re asking “who?”, yeah…he was also their star. He immediately became mired in a sexual assault case his rookie year.
Trevor: What a star.
Andrea: So, yeah, to be the star upon joining the Bulls, literally all Michael Jordan needed to do was win more than 30 games, not have a cocaine problem, not sexually assault anybody…it was a pretty low bar.
Trevor: Just for the record, the worst record in the league is Golden State right now, with 15 wins and 50 losses.
Andrea: That’s actually worse.
Trevor: That’s so much worse. I know you said we wouldn’t look it up, but I had to.
Andrea: I understand. I don’t really believe that Chicago necessarily deserved the reputation for being a “cocaine circus” more than any other franchise at the time. But maybe they all kind of were cocaine circuses, so…
Trevor: Well either, they were or they weren’t, you know what I mean? Like, earlier we were talking about how there was a lot more focus on that in the NBA in general than there ought to have been, and that could still apply.
Andrea: They probably weren’t doing any more cocaine than any other group that made money in the 80s.
Trevor: So they were doing fuckloads of cocaine.
Andrea: But especially when your team isn’t winning a lot, the drug narrative is one the media is going to latch onto. On “The Last Dance” when Michael Jordan is told that the Bulls at the time were called the “traveling cocaine circus”, he responds by laughing for what I felt was too long, like literally slapping his knee, like “I never heard that!”, clapping his hands. Like it was the funniest thing in the world. I might be reading too much into this, but for me it feels like someone trying to mimic human mirth.
Trevor: Yeah, it’s like an android, “Ah ha ha ha, what a joke.”
Andrea: Maybe it hides some darker feelings there, I don’t know. I feel pretty safe in saying Michael Jordan fucking hated his teammates during this early part of his NBA career. When he was asked if the “cocaine circus” evaluation was accurate, MJ got serious right away saying, “Ahhh...look, guys were doing things that I didn’t see.” Then he tells a story designed to make him look like the kind of person you want to represent your corporate brand. He says, "I had one event, preseason, I think we were in Peoria. It was in the hotel, so I’m trying to find my teammates. I started knocking on doors.” Which, already this story sounds made-up.
Trevor: Right.
Andrea: People don’t just start randomly knocking on hotel doors.
Trevor: Noone does that in a hotel. If you’re doing that, you are an asshole.
Andrea: I’m just looking for my teammates!
Trevor: Are you my teammate? Are you my teammate? No, what is this, Are You My Mother? You’re not my teammate, you’re a snort.
Andrea: But whatever, he continues: “I get to this one door, and I knock on the door and I can hear someone says, 'Shhhh... someone’s outside.' And then you hear this deep voice say, 'Who is it?' I say, 'MJ.' And then they all say, 'Aw fuck, he’s just a rookie, don’t worry about it.' They open up the door.”
Trevor: Thousands of hookers spilled from the room.
Andrea: That’s basically what he’s saying, yeah. He says, “I walk in and practically the whole team was in there. And it was, like, things I’ve never seen in my life as a young kid. You got your lines over here, your weed smokers over here, you’ve got your women over here.” Which, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a party, but people always divide into neat little groups like that. The weed smokers and the line snorters and the women havers.
Trevor: I kind of wonder if it’s just because of the cocaine people, they would split things up like that. I don’t know how I know that.
Andrea: The women are never by the drugs, of course. They’re just another vice to be consumed. They cocaine’s here, the women are here.
Trevor: Let’s do lines of women.
Andrea: Yeah, I don’t wonder too hard why he wasn’t invited in the first place. Especially because he continues: "The first thing I said, 'Look, man, I’m out.' Cause all I can about think is, if they come and raid this place right about now, I am just as guilty as everyone else that’s in this room. And from that point on, I was more or less on my own." It seems a little paranoid to me that he is so concerned about the place being raided...maybe he’d done a line first.
Trevor: No, you know what I think? He smoked some weed, he got paranoid, and he got out of there. That’s the penultimate, “I got too high.”
Andrea: Oh, no, we’re going to get raided.
Trevor: The police!
Andrea: The police are coming!
Trevor: Everyone knows I’m high!
Andrea: Or maybe it was on his mind because his father had just been caught with that embezzlement shit, like this was all in that same time period.
Trevor: Oh. Okay.
Andrea: That stuff that we talked about last episode.
Trevor: Yeah.
Andrea: So maybe he’s just got the police on the mind. I don’t know. Or perhaps the whole story is a lie. Hard to say.
Trevor: And he did all those things.
Andrea: Yeah. What I can for sure say is that MJ’s former Bulls teammate Craig Hodges was up to some shady shit, because he was publicly very upset about this “cocaine circus” story in the documentary. He’s like “I didn’t want to explain this to my kid.”
Trevor: Son, your dad did a lot of drugs and women during his NBA career, and I thought you should hear it from me after you…
Andrea: I thought you should hear it from Michael Jordan.
Trevor: I was going to say, you should hear it from me, after you heard it from Michael Jordan.
Andrea: What’s really funny to me, is Hodges couldn’t have even been in this MJ story, because he didn’t join the team until four years later, like after it had happened, but he was upset enough about MJ breaking these unwritten fraternal rules of the NBA team that he thinks exist, that he was absolutely up to some shady shit. But anyway, back to Michael. I can’t really fault a kid with a massive amount of money at stake for not wanting to get caught at a party like that, but at the same time, this is yet another example of MJ not exactly being the Michael Jordan of making friends.
Trevor: Who is the Michael Jordan of making friends?
Andrea: Mr. Rogers.
Trevor: Mr. Rogers, I knew it instantly.
Andrea: Michael Jordan isn’t even the Kelly Olynyk of making friends.
Trevor: …his facial hair…
Andrea: I’m not saying, listeners, that you have to do drugs to make friends, but you could at least be a little more chill.
Trevor: You can be cool about it. You can stay in the room, get arrested with everyone else, it’s fine.
Andrea: And again, maybe MJ was more chill about it and he just wants to sound like a good kid; it’s really hard to say.
Trevor: It just sounds like shit lawyers tell you to tell the police. I don’t know. Whatever.
Andrea: Whatever. What matters, is what his image was, which he was the good guy here and he’s still holding to that story however many years later, so whatever. His image was fiercely watched by corporate interests that were already using him in advertising and by his formidable mother.
Trevor: I lost to her in a sword fight.
Andrea: Most people that have fought her have.
Trevor: Most people have.
Andrea: Most people have lost to Deloris Jordan in a sword fight. We’ll talk a lot more future episodes about his Nike contract and all that, but there was more pressure on Jordan than your average NBA rookie to not get into trouble. Two years before MJ’s rookie year, Nancy Reagan had launched the “Just Say No” drug campaign that you may recall from your childhood, uness years of drug use have fried your memory.
Trevor: Or you were born after the year 1999.
Andrea: The government was putting a massive amount of money into anti-drug campaigns, and corporate America was all on board this incredibly non-nuanced bandwagon. In 1987, Michael Jordan and McDonald’s would team up for an anti-drug commercial that surely saved as many lives as McGriddles have ruined.
Trevor: Oh, I love McGriddles.
Andrea; Me, too. MJ closes this commercial with quote “and believe me, if you don’t use drugs, you can be just about anything you want to be.” So yeah, there’s the secret, guys, if any of you aren’t a billionaire with six NBA championships, maybe you shouldn’t have done drugs.
Trevor: Damnit.
Andrea: I know. You fucked up. I fucked up, too. It’s cool. It’s interesting to me that MJ, who famously didn’t speak much about social issues, did an anti-drug PSA. But it was a corporate and government sponsored message, so that’s okay.
Trevor: Money.
Andrea; Money! This was also the same year the Lakers did that anti-drug rap commercial, that have you seen that?
Trevor: Uh, I don’t think so.
Andrea: I recommend looking up, because at least half the people involved are absolutely on drugs making the thing, and it is amazing.
Trevor: They’re high as shit filming it.
Andrea: It’s fucking amazing.
Trevor: Yo, what are we supposed to say….
Andrea: I think I’d be…I bet Michael Jordan’s at least like done cocaine. Looking at the people he spent time with on and off the court plus his adventurous eager-to-please type personality, and just the fact that he was a young rich person in the late 80s/early 90s, it seems likely. But it was definitely more important to him to have a marketable public face and to be good at basketball, I guess.
Trevor: Yeah, that’s a good guess.
Andrea: I think he liked being good at basketball. I’m taking some wild speculation here.
Trevor: Yeah, hot takes; we got nothing but hot takes.
Andrea: I could also maybe see him being the kind of person that didn’t like cocaine. Jordan without anything in his system is already super emotional and driven and a little paranoid. His drugs of choice were competition and money and I guess that worked out just fine for him.
Trevor: I’ve never done money; is it fun?
Andrea: I’ve not done it as much as Michael Jordan has, I cannot tell you.
Trevor: I’ve done a little bit of money.
Andrea: I’ve done a little bit of money and it was pretty good.
Trevor: Yeah, it was pretty sweet.
Andrea: Yeah, I feel like doing more money is better.
Trevor: I would do more.
Andrea: Any estimation we can make about MJ’s personal relationship with cocaine is, of course, wild speculation anyway, and that’s not what we do at this podcast.
Trevor: Right. We never speculate.
Andrea: Only the facts.
Trevor. We only conjecture.
Andrea: We only report serious facts, like the fact that hundreds of thousands of unsolved murders have occurred in the very country that MJ lives in.
Trevor: He lived there. During that time.
Andrea: You do the math.
Trevor: I have.
Andrea: Regardless, NBA drug policy, his mother’s ever-present pressure to appear respectable, and MJ’s concern with his image, kept him from doing drugs, enough that it wasn’t a problem. And the sorry state of the Bulls and the NBA set enough of a low bar that just not having a drug problem made MJ extremely marketable. And then of course generally changing racial attitudes blah blah blah, everything we’ve talked about, it’s just it’s added up to make Michael Jordan one of the most marketable stars the world has ever seen. And that’s our tale for today!
Trevor: Oh my god.
Andrea: Do you feel like I’ve made my argument that he’s a lucky son of a bitch?
Trevor: I feel like it was well-made, also, he’s pretty good at basketball and that’s lucky.
Andrea: I wish you were just like “no.”
Trevor: No, he’s just the GOAT. No, uh, I don’t think he is the GOAT. I think Tom Brady is.
Andrea: Fair. Greatest Basketball Player of All Time, Tom Brady.
Trevor: Tom Brady.
Andrea: I do want to be fair to Michael for a brief moment, I looked around for quotes of him acknowledging how much he lucked out, and he did say at one point, “Everyone tries to figure out why all of this has happened to me, and there are all these theories and no one is willing to consider how much of it was just luck...I’m telling you, luck has played more of a role than anyone understands.” So it does seem like a rare show of humility from the man.
Trevor: Yeah, that is a very cool…that’s the coolest thing I’ve heard MJ say.
Andrea: Except this quote comes from the really terrible book Hang Time: Days and Dreams With Michael Jordan by Bob Greene. The gist of this book is “jaded newspaper man who has lost all faith in humanity hangs out with Michael Jordan for a bit and learns to love again”.
Trevor: Oh my god, that sounds like a really terrible film.
Andrea: Yeah, I have not read a lot of it, but I kinda skimmed through…
Trevor: You know what my theory is, immediately, I don’t know anything about this, this is the first time I’m hearing about it. My theory: this is a rejected movie script that turned into a book.
Andrea: Michael Jordan probably did say this about luck, but a better journalist would maybe stop sucking Michael’s dick for a minute and think about how little he may have meant it. MJ was good at saying what he thought the press wanted to hear about how basketball is a team sport and how he’s just a good American boy who worked hard and didn’t do drugs and played good basketball. But actions speak louder than words, and MJ’s actions say he 100% thinks he’s better than everyone else and luck doesn’t have anything to do with it. If you don’t believe me on that, please join us for future episodes! We will continue to make that case.T hank you for slamming with us today! Join us on future days when we’ll continue with our more-or-less chronological telling of MJ’s life. I’m looking forward to discussion of his rookie year, his initial Nike contract, his relationship with Bulls coaches…we’ve got some fun stuff. However, next episode we have a special treat for you.
Trevor: Yes, yes, we’re going to be talking about Space Jam.
Andrea: We’re going to be talking about Space Jam. Our colleagues at Front Row Film Roast are doing an online roast of Space Jam on June 6th and we want to give our listeners the behind-the-scenes info that will make that viewing even more enjoyable. You can search for Front Row Film Roast on the social medias if you want more information about that. And, of course, please remember to follow Fuck Michael Jordan on social media and on your podcast apps so that you never miss an episode. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please spread the word by telling your coke dealer that he or she may enjoy it, as well.
