The Pizza Incident

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Image from Chilling Competition

Like Maradona for soccer, Michael Jordan is the "God" version of basketball, a man whose skills on the board could only be worthy of the most supernatural deities. Obviously his charisma and leadership earned him a place among the most famous athletes of his generation (an honor shared with Maradona himself and Michael Schumacher at the same time) so anything from the subtlest to the most outrageous in his life never went unnoticed by the cameras and ink of the world's press.

Precisely the documentary presented by the Netflix platform called "The last dance" intends to show a less divine and more mundane Jordan, following the incidents of the Chicago Bulls star in what would be the final season of "His Majesty" and his teammates in the City of the Winds team. Certainly, there seems to be a need among TV networks, movie studios and online platforms to bring down the gods of Olympus where we mortals place them; I don't know if it is to bring them to our level or because today's "millennials" require observing stories that take them out of their worlds of "influencers" , "tictokers" and "selfies".

It is there where the story of the pizza stands out as the high point of the documentary-series, an event that tries to present to the public an aspect of Jordan's personality, a kind of leader-divine that everyone must endure. The legendary story goes that MJ23 played the fifth game of the 1997 final against the Utah Jazz suffering from the rigors of a severe flu, yet that night he scored 38 crucial points to win the stave.

The other side of the story tells another version of the same story. Michael Jordan was upset that the night before the game his security team and teammates didn't let him eat any dinner after he was late to practice. He took the last of his pizza and said, "This is mine," and then smeared it with his saliva to keep it from being eaten. In view of the hunger he felt, "His Majesty of the Air" asked for another pizza to be brought for him alone, which according to his security team was brought by five people, something that seemed suspicious to them but that MJ23 did not care about, so he swallowed it without paying attention to details. The next day Jordan showed up at practice with severe stomach pains, claiming he had been poisoned and pointing to the pizza he ordered for dinner.

Apparently this type of reaction from Jordan was not a one-day thing. In the documentary, the ex-partners themselves assured that this behavior was recurrent in him and that he not only used to spit out food so that others would not eat, but also exerted tremendous emotional pressure, almost like a dictator, on them and even on the figure of Jerry Krause, mythical general manager of the Chicago Bulls and creator of the dynasty that dominated the NBA in the last decade of the 20th century.

Regardless of the pizza incident and the events narrated in The last dance, the figure of MJ23 remains mythical even decades after his retirement, and like many idols like him who we are responsible for raising them to that status in the sky usually we love what they are able to do in the center of the stage, whether they are examples for children or experts in pizza toppings.

Carlos D Pérez Guerrero / @waraira777

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