Michael Jordan missed just a handful of games during the peak of his NBA career, and built a reputation for being among the league’s iron men, both due to the fact that his off nights were few and far between and he prided himself on shouldering a monstrous load for the Chicago Bulls.

Early on in his career, though, Jordan’s desire to play all the time hit a bit of a bump in the road. As a sophomore in the league, Jordan suffered a broken foot three games into the 1985-86 campaign. He was able to eventually return to the team under a remarkably strict minutes restriction, one that we learned during episode two of The Last Dance served as a source of major source of frustration.

Jordan used a portion of his time off to return to the University of North Carolina, where unbeknownst to (and eventually to the chagrin of) the Bulls, he played basketball. At one point, the franchise had to explain to Jordan that even though he had a 90-10 chance of being OK playing on the injury, that 10 percent indicated the odds that his career would come to an end if he played on the bum wheel, something far too high for the team to risk.

“So I said to Michael, ‘You’re not understanding the risk-reward ratio,’” former Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf recalled. “’If you had a terrible headache, and I gave you a bottle of pills, and nine of the pills would cure you, and one of the pills would kill you, would you take a pill?’”

“And I look at him and I said, ‘Depends on how f*ckin’ bad the headache is,’” Jordan said in response.

Eventually, the two sides came to an agreement on Jordan playing reduced number of minutes (seven per half) to ease his way back in, as Jordan became suspicious that the Bulls were trying to tank for a better pick in the draft. In an old clip, Jordan was asked about whether he thought that was the case, telling the press that he thought it reflected a “losing attitude.”

This still was a source of major frustration for Jordan, as he was essentially placed on a hyper-strict form of load management.

“At the time, the coach was Stan Auerbach,” Jordan said. “So I said, ‘Stan, f*ck these guys. Give me the most important seven minutes that you could think about.’”

Jordan went on to tell a story about a game against the Indiana Pacers that Chicago needed to win as they fought their way into the playoff picture. At the time, his minutes restriction was pushed to 14 minutes a half, and with the game on the line, the Bulls were down by one with 31 seconds remaining. Prior to the game, however, Auerbach was warned that going a second over would lead to his firing on the spot, and at that moment, Jordan had hit his allocation of minutes.

“I’m begging Stan, ‘Put me in the game, come on,’” Jordan recalled. “‘It’s only 14 f*cking seconds, Stan, 13 seconds. Put me in for 13 seconds.’ He says, ‘MJ, I can’t put you in, I’d lose my job.’ It fueled the whole theory that here we’re trying to not make the playoffs so we can get a better draft pick, but I vowed to make the playoffs every year and this is a chance for us to make the playoffs.”

Things worked out for Jordan — John Paxson hit a shot and the Bulls made the postseason. Still, the saga planted distrust in Jordan towards the team’s management, both ownership and the front office, that never quite went away.

The Last Dance, ESPN’s documentary about the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls, is far more than just a film about that particular season. It explains the backstories of all the major players to provide context for how they got to that sixth ring and what led to the various tensions that threatened to keep them from winning it.

The central focus of the documentary is, unsurprisingly, Michael Jordan. Even as episodes dive deeper into others, like the second episode looking at Scottie Pippen, Jordan remains the primary character. After explaining why Pippen was frustrated with the Bulls that season, particularly GM Jerry Krause, and how that led him to pushing surgery back until after the summer causing him to miss the first half of the season, it shifts to how Jordan was left to pick up the slack and try to drag the Bulls to wins. It’s here that we get Michael talking about what many consider to be his greatest asset (and also, at times, his greatest flaw), his insane competitive fire.

“Every time I step on that basketball court my focus is to win the game. It drives me insane when I can’t,” Jordan said. “As you get older you look back and you understand how you became who you are. I don’t think I’d be here without the lessons I learned at a very young age. That competitiveness within me, started as a kid.”

From here the documentary flashes back to Jordan’s childhood in Wilmington, North Carolina, where Michael notes there were two primary forces driving him to greatness. The first was the racism he faced as a kid and wanting to get out of Wilmington.

“At the time you had racism all over North Carolina — all over the United States — and it was a lot of it around there,” Jordan said. “So, as a kid, it was like, this is where I don’t want to be. I want to excel outside of this. So my motivation was to be something outside of Wilmington. For me, it became athletics.”

The second factor, and what drove his competitive fire, was his older brother, Larry, who was initially a better basketball player than him. Larry says in the documentary that he was the worst of the Jordans when it came to being overly competitive. “My brothers hated losing, but not on the same level like me, because if you beat me back then, we had to fight, and that’s just the way I was.”

Larry was also the favorite of their father, James, and Michael explains that was “traumatic” and made him want to be so good he would garner the same amount of attention from his dad.

“I don’t think, from a competitive standpoint, I would be here without the confrontations with my brother,” Michael said. “When you come to blows with someone you absolutely love, that’s igniting every fire within you. And I always felt like I was fighting Larry for my father’s attention. … When you’re going through it, it’s traumatic, because I want that. I want that approval, I want that type of confidence. So my determination got even greater to be as good if not better than my brother.”

This section of the documentary, speaking on his relationship with is brother and father, is as vulnerable as you’ll ever see Michael Jordan. You can see the emotion in his face as he talks about desperately wanting his father’s approval, and it explains so much of his win at all costs attitude that became the defining characteristic of him, not only as a basketball player, but as a man. It also shows that this part of Michael wasn’t born of something great, but out of pain.

ESPN’s 10-part docuseries about the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls debuted on Sunday night. The first chapter of The Last Dance focused on the first month that Bulls team was together, along with a whole lot of backstory into Michael Jordan.

This edition of the series also gave the backstory behind how the phrase “the last dance” was forever tied to this Bulls squad. Two players on that squad, Steve Kerr and Bill Wennington, explained to ESPN that it stemmed from a document that head coach Phil Jackson handed out during the first team meeting of the year.

“Phil always looked for a theme for every season, and given that it was the last year we were gonna be together — management had already made that decision — in typical Phil fashion, he had a name for it,” Kerr said.

“We’d arrived at the practice facility, it’s our first official meeting as a team,” Wennington said. “Get the team handbook, laminated on the front page, The Last Dance.”

Previously, it had already been announced that Jackson would not return at the conclusion of the 1997-98 campaign, and the Bulls front office had already made it clear that they did not think this version of the franchise had a particularly long shelf life. Of course, Jordan would go on to retire at the end of the season, while the team lost a host of players, like Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman.

“I talked to the players about particularly how important it wad for us to really be together in this last run that we were going to have,” Jackson said. “So I called it The Last Dance.”

There was plenty of tension that existed between the Bulls’ locker room and its front office, something that is evident throughout the first episode. But fortunately for everyone, it ended up turning into a last dance to remember.

The second episode of ESPN’s tremendous The Last Dance documentary following the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls — and diving heavily into the backstory of its major players — puts Scottie Pippen into central focus. One of the major points is that Pippen, by the 97-98 season, was arguably the most underpaid athlete at the time.

Entering the final year of a 7-year, $18 million contract, Pippen was the 122nd highest paid player in the NBA and sixth highest paid member of the Bulls, despite being the clear second best player to Jordan on the team and a top 5 or 10 player in the NBA — with some willing to argue he was the second best player in the league to Jordan. Owner Jerry Reinsdorf refused to discuss any renegotiations with any player under contract, so Pippen simply had to play out his last year — with the potential of being traded.

At the end of the 96-97 title run, Pippen suffered a ruptured tendon in his ankle that would require surgery, but rather than have that surgery in June so he’d be able to return for the start of the next season, Scottie saw an opportunity to stick it to the Bulls front office a bit by postponing surgery and enjoying his summer instead of rehabbing.

“I had a ruptured tendon in my ankle, and I decided to have surgery late because I was like, you know what, I’m not gonna f*ck my summer up trying to rehab for a season,” Pippen said in The Last Dance. “They’re not going to look forward to having me, so I’m going to enjoy my summer and use the season to prepare.”

It’s an incredible quote and also, after five championships, it’s kind of understanding why Pippen would decide to not ruin his offseason with rehab given his contract situation. Unsurprisingly, Michael Jordan is less understanding of the choice and still isn’t pleased with Pippen’s decision to delay surgery until after the summer.

“Scottie was wrong in that scenario,” Jordan said. “He could’ve gotten his surgery as soon as the season was over and been ready for the season. What Scottie was trying to do was force management to change his contract, and Jerry wasn’t going to do that. So now I gotta start the season knowing Scottie wasn’t going to be around, but we have to find a way to win.”

In today’s era of players being more assertive about their health and timetables for returning from injury, Pippen’s decision might not be quite as controversial, but at this time — and to do it on a team with someone like Jordan who loathed missing games and not playing — it’s pretty incredible for Scottie to make that choice.

If The Last Dance does one thing, it is showing just how incredible it is that the 97-98 Bulls managed to win a title despite so much dysfunction going on. The star players and coach hated Jerry Krause, with Jordan and Pippen regularly yelling at him and making vicious jokes about him in front of the entire team. There was tension between the two superstars on the team due to Pippen’s choice to delay surgery. There were trade rumors involving Pippen that pushed him to make a trade request, and the documentary hasn’t even gotten to Dennis Rodman yet, who regularly would go missing.

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Perhaps the best part of The Last Dance, ESPN’s 10-part docuseries about the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls, is the sheer number of incredible stories that get told by guys like Michael Jordan, Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen, and the rest of the squad. One such story got told on Sunday evening during the first chapter of the story, and it involved Jordan making the jump from the University of North Carolina to the NBA.

Jordan stressed that legendary Tar Heels coach Dean Smith ran a “clean program,” which was not necessarily the case in Chicago, a team for which “drugs were prevalent” and the roster was composed of “a lot of partiers.” The camera then cut to Jordan in his living room being interviewed for the series, where he was asked about an old article in which the squad was referred to as “the Bulls traveling cocaine circus.”

After hearing this, Jordan tipped his head back and let out a hearty laugh, and while he did not explicitly say that was accurate, he laid out why that wasn’t necessarily far from the truth.

Look, guys were doing things that I didn’t see. 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. I get to this one door, and I knock on the door and I can hear someone says, “Shh shh shh, someone’s outside.” And then you hear this deep voice say, “Who is it?” I say, “MJ.” And then they all say, “Aw f*ck, he’s just a rookie, don’t worry about it.” So they open up the door, 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. So, 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.

Here’s the video of Jordan telling the story.

The entire first episode is fantastic, which is not unexpected, considering it is a tell-all series into one of the most captivating teams in the history of American sports. But it is probably fair to say that The Last Dance would still be outstanding if it was just 10 hours of Michael Jordan telling stories about Bulls things that made him laugh extremely hard. This one highlights an interesting part of Jordan’s backstory — the dude was so hyper-focused on basketball and had such a sheltered upbringing that he was mortified of getting arrested at a party in the 1980s — but above everything else, this was the single-funniest story of the episode.

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I too just want to be swaddled and fed and left alone.

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