Even the GOAT of basketball couldn’t fully escape his demons.
Michael Jordan finished his NBA career having won six titles with the Chicago Bulls between 1991 and 1998, winning the finals MVP award on all six occasions.
But back when seeking his third straight title with the Bulls in 1993, Jordan was attracting the headlines both on and off the court after he was seen at a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey the night before a hugely important playoff game .
Picture this.
The 1993 NBA Eastern Conference Finals were taking place between the Bulls and the New York Knicks that had 11-time All-Star Patrick Ewing at the helm, and in his prime.
Having finished atop the regular season standings in the East with a 60-22 winning record, the Knicks had claimed home court advantage for their series against the second-seeded Bulls (57-25) with the winner set to advance to the NBA Finals.
Game 1 was a closely fought contest.
Despite a game-high 27 points – albeit at a 37.0 percent shooting clip – from the former North Carolina superstar, the Bulls lost 98-90 at Madison Square Garden.
Scottie Pippen matched his teammate’s 27 points, though his seven turnovers proved detrimental in the end.
Coming off a loss, there was the expectation that the Bulls would be able to bounce back in Game 2 that was to take place just two days later.
But on the eve of the showdown, Jordan was spotted at an Atlantic City casino, and not only was he reported to have been there into the early hours of the following morning, he was also thought to have lost $500,000 in the process.
Whilst anonymous sources told to the New York Times (h/t Los Angeles Times) at the time that they had seen the shooting guard in the casino at 2:30 am, Jordan was adamant to that he was in bed by 1:00 am and had a full eight hours of sleep before the Bulls’ shoot around.
Ewing’s Knicks were another formidable foe Jordan was named MVP in the FinalsGetty“The times were all out of context,” Jordan said to the media angrily after the Bulls’ practice before Game 2.
“Anybody who saw me there at 2:30 is lying…You show me the guy who saw me there at 2:30, and he’ll have a lawsuit on his hands.
“I wanted to get away from the city of New York and relax, instead of sitting there and listening to the media hype up about the first game–my mistakes, Scottie Pippen didn’t play well, Michael Jordan didn’t play well. I’m just trying to get away from it, instead of staying in my room, which is four walls, already.
“I chose to take a ride, in a limo, didn’t drive, rested, sitting there talking about all the different conversations that my father and my friends could talk about. Get up there, get to a private gambling area, come home at a respectable hour so I can get eight hours, get ready for the next game. And that’s the truth.”
Down 0-1 in the series, the best way to answer the critics was to perform in Game 2 and help his team level the series.
However, Jordan’s performance drew plenty of criticism.
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Though he had a game-high 36 points, Jordan missed 20 of his 32 shot attempts that night, and the Bulls suffered an agonising 96-91 defeat, taking an 0-2 deficit back to the Windy City.
The Knicks may have felt that they were strongly in command of the series, but Jordan, Pippen, and the rest of the Bulls had other ideas.
With basketball now back at the United Center, it was Pippen who rose to the occasion, dropping 29 points as Chicago blew out the Knicks 103-83.
‘Air Jordan’ took flight in Game 4, soaring for 54 points which saw the series levelled at 2-2, whilst simultaneously swinging the momentum firmly into the Bulls’ favor.
Ultimately, the Knicks wouldn’t recover from this, and Chicago went on to win the series in six games, and booked their ticket to the NBA Finals.
Having refused to address the media surrounding what happened in Atlantic City during the Eastern Conference Finals, Jordan did eventually open up to his good friend in the media Ahmad Rashad, then of NBC, ahead of the 1993 Finals.
There, he aimed to clear the air over his image, having been portrayed as a gambling addict.
“It was unfair that I was being considered a criminal for doing something that’s not illegal,” Jordan iterated to Rashad.
“Gambling is legal, and betting is legal. For what I bet, yeah, it’s a little bit more than I wanted to lose. I didn’t bet to lose, but I lost it, and I paid off all my debts. I didn’t want to go to NBC, anyone else, to let him know ‘Hey, I lost $500,000’.”
But even the greatest of the great have their own inner demons and struggles to deal with. It’s just that superstar athletes, like Jordan, unfortunately have their struggles laid bare for the public to see and scrutinize.
“My family’s not starving. My wife, if I had a problem, would have left me,” he added. “No certainly, when it came to me and say, seek help from my family, my mother and father, we’re close-knit people and have monitored me when I was a kid and I was born up until where I am now and if ever had a problem, they never had a problem telling me that I have a problem.”
Jordan once tried to cheat his teammate’s mom in a game of cardsGettyAs it pertains to how the 1992-93 season ended, the rest is history as they say, as Jordan spearheaded his team to defeat the Charles Barkley-led Phoenix Suns 4-2.
Dominating the court and single-handedly leading his team with an average of 41.0 points per game, the Bulls ultimately completed their first three-peat under head coach Phil Jackson.
The Bulls would achieve that tremendous feat a second time between 1996-98, with Jordan once again leading the way, and cemented his name into the history books as one of, if not the greatest, basketball player of all time.
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