Featured Image Credit: Getty
Topics: Michael Jordan, Basketball, Baseball
Mark Sanderson
Michael Jordan reportedly refused to work with a sports media outlet again after he was angered by their cover page.
Jordan, 62, is not a man to cross and one media outlet knows this to their eternal cost.
The media has always relied on big personalities and stars to sell their product. This is especially the case with print magazines, which vie for the attention of readers on the racks with countless other titles.
For Jordan, trust has always been huge - whether that’s with his teammates or anyone else. Break that trust and you are no longer welcome as far as Jordan is concerned, as Sports Illustrated found out. One cover story they ran in the mid-1990s resulted in Jordan refusing to talk to them again.
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The magazine issue came out while Jordan was playing baseball for the Chicago White Sox's affiliate team Birmingham Barons.
The cover story caption read: “Bag it, Michael – Jordan and the White Sox are embarrassing baseball."
Jordan’s father had been a big baseball fan, which was part of MJ's motivation to switch professions. His then-agent David Falk believed the magazine got the totally wrong angle on the story.
“Michael Jordan gave up everything he had earned as the king of basketball to play Minor League baseball and subject himself to criticism,” said Falk via MLB.com.
“He put everything on the line to compete, with nothing to gain. That is the essence of sorts. To this day, SI has never apologized to Michael, and he'll never talk to them.”
There was no arguing that Jordan was a better baseball player than he was a basketball competitor.
Yet Jordan was stepping largely into the unknown by moving into a different sport. He did so by giving everything he had to it, which was and is the nature of the man.
Whatever sales Sports Illustrated gained from that cover, they certainly lost in future quotes direct from Jordan.
The author of that cover, Steve Wulf, didn’t write the lines on the front page but admitted that the outlet took it too far.
“Going back and reading my original story, it was snarky,” Wulf said when speaking to NBC Sport several years later.
“And I was pretty hard on him. But it certainly didn’t match the headline that Sports Illustrated put on the cover.
“I did acknowledge in the story that he was working hard and that he was willing to go from being ‘The Guy’ to being one of the guys. He was pursuing a dream, which was great. But at the time, I didn’t see any real natural ability. That’s basically the story I wrote.”