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JM: [Chuckles] Well, I had a couple with Isiah [Thomas]. This was after they had won, early 90s, they had won in ’89, they repeated in ’90. I went up there for something, the Pistons were starting to fall apart totally, and I went up there to do a story about that. Isiah had a confrontation the day before with someone in the parking lot. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I said I wanted to talk to him after practice and he was like, ‘Yeah, but I don’t wanna talk about what happened yesterday.’
II said okay, so I started talking to him and the interview was going so well, and me being me, I said well I know you said you didn’t wanna talk about it, but let me ask you about it and we’re in a corner of the gymnasium, and Isiah goes, well I thought we agreed you weren’t gonna ask me about it. I go yeah, okay. And he goes, ‘Well, why did you ask me about it?’ And his voice kept getting louder and louder and louder, and finally Laimbeer comes over and kind of got between us. Afterwards, I thought he was correct [laughs] in a way. OK, we did agree but you’re a journalist, you’re always gonna take another shot, right? Because you always find out how many times somebody said, well, I don’t want to talk about it, turns out they did want to talk about it.
That was one, I had one with Jordan. I was doing a story on him during the course of the story, we’re at this place, this was in the late ‘80s, and he brings down a child, a kid. And I didn’t know he had a kid – and nobody had written it – I’m holding the baby and I’m talking about my own sons and everything like that. I go to the game that night, and the PR person says, Hey, Michael expects that you won’t write about his child.’ And I said well, I was holding this child, I wasn’t gonna keep him in a closet.
I just felt that he was sort of putting me in too bad of a position to show me that kid and then say, ‘Hey, you can’t write’, and I didn’t care they had a kid out of wedlock. It wasn’t a moral thing with me, it was just kind of reporting detail. He told me not to write it and I wrote it and he got very mad, but I think what happens, what that speaks to mostly is the difference in the eras that’s going on. That these were the biggest stars in the world, not just the sport, but the world. And they understood all of them. I had relationships with some that were better than others, but they seem to understand that it was part of the yin and yang. That there was good stuff and there was bad stuff, and that you had to write some of the bad stuff and they might get bad for a minute, but then life would go on. I think you guys who are covering things now, I think you have it harder than we did. That’s my guess, right?
You take Jordan, who’s the most powerful guy in the sports world, but pre-Internet. I mean, LeBron has been his own corporation since he came into the league. He understood that. I get it. I do. I’m not cutting him up for it. Jordan didn’t have that. He kind of needed Sports Illustrated, it was a very symbiotic relationship. Well, who the hell does LeBron need? He doesn’t need anybody. I mean he doesn’t even really need the league [chuckles]
I was completely and utterly lucky that did not exist. I mean the Dream Team was 1992. When I went back to research the book I did in 2011 – Sports Illustrated came out once a week. I didn’t even do an Internet column, there was no Internet, so I was writing like once a week. I mean if that team existed now, there would quite literally be two million posts per day about what they were doing, what practice was like, and who they’re dating and who’s pissed off at who. That didn’t exist. There was a whole world that you were able to feed into. So once again, that was a product of me being pretty lucky.