Michael Jordan‘s baseball sabbatical in 1993 has taken on mythical status over the years. Having just won three straight championships, MJ was in the absolute prime of his career, so conspiracy theories ran rampant about the real reason for his sudden departure from basketball.
The NBA’s tin-hat contingent has tried to posit that it was some sort of covert suspension on the part of the league and commissioner David Stern stemming from the various gambling debts he had accrued, but perhaps the most plausible explanation is that Jordan was still distraught at the tragic death of his father and needed time to do a little soul-searching.
We may never know what the real catalyst was, but it appears a new biopic devoted to that period of Jordan’s career will ostensibly seek to answer a few remaining questions. According to a new report, Will Smith is set to produce the upcoming film, tentatively titled The Prospect.
Via EmpireOnline.com:
This period, was, of course, already covered in 1996’s Space Jam: an “alternative” recounting of Jordan’s lost couple of years, in which he plays a secret intergalactic basketball game in the centre of the Earth with Bugs Bunny and Marvin the Martian. We know which version we prefer to believe.
Ben Epstein wrote the screenplay for The Prospect, which has been knocking around the Black List of buzzy unproduced scripts for a while. The project will come together under Smith’s Overlook Entertainment banner, but there’s no time frame so far.
It was also already covered in the ESPN 30 for 30 film Jordan Rides the Bus, so it’ll be interesting to see what new angles Smith’s film will try and explore. A lot of folks would like to pretend this part of the story never happened, but it’s just so bizarre that it obviously continues to capture the imaginations of a certain subset of Jordan fans.
