In just under a week, scores of sports fans will be thrilled to sit in front of their televisions and watch ‘The Last Dance’ which is a 2020 sports documentary miniseries focusing on the 1997–98 Chicago Bulls.
While the upcoming 10-part documentary is highly anticipated, the star of the series, Michael Jordan, is concerned that the series doesn’t paint a very good picture of him.
In fact, director Jason Hehir revealed to The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch that Michael Jordan once told him that he was concerned about what people will think of him after they watch his highly-anticipated upcoming ESPN docuseries.
“When people see this footage I’m not sure they’re going to be able to understand why I was so intense, why I did the things I did, why I acted the way I acted, and why I said the things I said,” Hehir recalls of a conversation he had with Jordan about the docuseries in 2017.
Jordan pointed to a specific moment where he came down hard on his Chicago Bulls teammate Scotty Burrell.
”When you see the footage of [me riding with Scotty Burrell], you’re going to think that I’m a horrible guy,” Hehir remembers His Airness telling him before defending his aggressive approach. “But you have to realize that the reason why I was treating him like that is because I needed him to be tough in the playoffs and we’re facing the Indiana’s and Miami’s and New York’s in the Eastern Conference. He needed to be tough and I needed to know that I could count on him.”
Deitsch also made sure to pull a quote from MJ in the seventh episode of the docuseries that pretty much justified his leadership techniques.
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“Look, winning has a price,” Jordan said. “And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates who came after me didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you joined the team, you lived at a certain standard that I played the game. And I wasn’t going to take any less.
”Now, if that means I had to go in there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that,” he continued. “You ask all my teammates. The one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something that he didn’t f–king do.”
The Last Dance will begin airing on ESPN on April 19.
