I had a *scorching* take about the MJ pizza story but then another writer debunked it
Last Sunday night, ESPN’s 10-part MJ documentary The Last Dance concluded. For five weeks, it might as well have been our only basketball-related sustenance—ESPN’s other programming treated it like it was the only game in town. And, sure, it was entertaining, if not particularly enlightening or revealing. In a sports landscape that’s retroactively ranking everything since there’s not any new information coming in for a while, watching fresh Jordan footage from the peak of his powers felt comforting and even inspiring, at times.
However, while Jordan did acknowledge the controversies that surrounded his career—his gambling, the urban legend of his under-the-table suspension from the NBA, and the infamous poison pizza—the man himself did not provide satisfying answers. Instead, he let others speak for him when it came to the details.
It didn’t take long before these explanations were held up to scrutiny. On Monday’s episode of “Jalen and Jacoby,” The Last Dance director Jason Hehir explains that Jordan spit in the pizza so no one else in the hotel suite would eat it. That is a violation of like, nine layers of bro code, but that’s beside the point. MJ is falling on the sword—it’s a pizza sword, haha am I right?—for whatever reason.
So what really happened?
I’ve long been suspicious about what happened the eve of the flu game, aging back to 2013 when it was revealed that food poisoning was the reason MJ was sick, not the flu, the explanation that had been trotted out on the day of the game. The source on the record back then was Tim Grover, Jordan’s personal trainer at the time. (Notice that all of these people providing the details of the poison pizza have careers that are closely tied to Jordan’s reputation). Ron Harper has claimed since at least 2012 that food poisoning is the reason for Jordan’s full-body illness on the day of Game 5.
Something I’ve been grateful for in ESPN’s wall-to-wall coverage of all things Jordan— the games they’ve uploaded straight out of the NBA’s vault. The NBA’s rights issues are notoriously strict, and full games, even the most famous ones, can be extremely tough to find. The entire flu game is right here, and anyone can watch it, provided that they have a ESPN login.
The results are… inconclusive. While Jordan powers through in the game, there’s just many too moving parts to call any particular development definitive. So I reached out to friend/fellow basketball writer Nick Greene—cop his book when it comes out!—who lived and breathed Bulls basketball as a native Chicagoan in the 90s, who immediately shot down any notion of cover-up.
In fact, he’s the one who set my whole line of thinking askew; I mistakenly had built in an assumption that the Bulls had stayed in Salt Lake City during the Finals, where they had actually stayed in Park City, which is basically Gomorrah by comparison. Greene believes the food poisoning story, even suggesting that it’s likely Jordan had the norovirus, which would line up more closely with his supposed symptoms than good old fashioned food poisoning (or even a landmark hangover). Unfortunately, I am convinced that this is closer to what happened than I had imagined, which I will not go into since it is now the most misinformative take of all time.
C’est la vie—sometimes when you’re ready to report something out fully expecting what you find to support your narrative, it blows up right in your face. This is one of those times. Things are slow on the Jayhawk front, and I put pressure on myself to come up with some sort of takeaway nugget this week. But, I got nothing. In the end, I’ll probably remember The Last Dance for its most obvious accomplishment: displacing “Crying Jordan” with a fresh batch of new memez.
Thanks for reading, friends. Here’s a TikTok I keep watching:
