A long-known aspect of Michael Jordan lore that has been reinforced time and time again during The Last Dance is that he wasn’t exactly the best teammate. While the Chicago Bulls won a whole lot of games and championships, Jordan had no issue challenging his teammates. This, of course, has plenty of downsides, including one bizarre story that surfaced this week.
Sam Smith, the longtime journalist who wrote The Jordan Rules and makes a number of cameos in The Last Dance, appeared on KNBR’s Tolbert, Krueger, and Brooks podcast. As Smith tells it, Jordan’s teammates had a story about Horace Grant that revolved around MJ’s response when Grant would have an off night.
“Players would come to me over the years and said, ‘You know what he did? He took Horace’s food away on the plane because Horace had a bad game,’” Smith said, per KNBR. “[Michael] told the stewardesses ‘Don’t feed him, he doesn’t deserve to eat.’”
This is an extremely weird way to get a point across. It’s also an anecdote that probably isn’t that surprising following this past Sunday’s episodes, which included Jordan accusing Grant of being the main source for Smith’s book that infamously painted Jordan in an unflattering light as a hyper-demanding teammate. Others in the doc more or less said Grant couldn’t have been the main source, and during his podcast cameo, Smith mentioned that the fear of Jordan was something that existed throughout the franchise.
“They would tell me stuff like that and they they’d say ‘Why don’t you write this?’” Smith said during his podcast appearance. “And I would say ‘Well I can’t write it unless you say it.’ I don’t do ‘league sources.’ You can’t do that kind of stuff on these kind of things. ‘If you want to be quoted I’ve got no problem with that.’ ‘No, no, no we can’t say that about Michael Jordan.’”
