In just about each episode of The Last Dance we have heard Michael Jordan tell a different story about how he would find additional motivation for himself going into big games. That motivation sometimes came from a genuine place, like trying to topple the Bad Boys Pistons who knocked them out of the playoffs two years in a row.
Other times, that motivation was manufactured from something the media said (like, Clyde Drexler was on the same level as him) or if he knew Jerry Krause was fond of a player on the other team (poor Dan Majerle). By 1996, Jordan’s ways of manipulating the truth to feed his competitive fire were well known, and George Karl was trying his best to avoid that same fate when he saw Jordan at a restaurant with Ahmad Rashad prior to Game 1 in Chicago.
As Jordan and Rashad remember it, Karl walked right by them without acknowledging them, which angered Michael because they were two UNC guys who played golf together. As Karl told Scott Van Pelt on SportsCenter Sunday night, he was simply trying not to get caught up in Jordan’s head games or say the wrong thing to him with a comment Jordan could flip into some motivation.
“It is true. I had Brendan Malone on my staff from the Detroit Pistons, and he said Michael plays head games with you all the time, and he said you don’t want to mess with him in the series. Say hello at the beginning of the series, shake his hand at the end of the series, but during the series don’t let him use anything to motivate himself to be a better player than the greatest player in NBA basketball.”
By simply trying not to do something wrong, Karl did something wrong and that’s just how it was going against Jordan. You were damned if you do and damned if you don’t, because he could always find something that worked as a slight against him — even if it meant making it up.
