Michael Jordan And Horace Grant Got Into Heated Arguments All The Time On Bulls: ‘Horace Wasn’t Meeting Michael’s High Expectations’

NBA legends Michael Jordan and Horace Grant got into heated arguments all the time on the Chicago Bulls. 

According to Scottie Pippen, Grant wasn’t meeting Jordan’s high expectations. 

“Another role I took on had to do with my buddy Horace Grant,” Pippen wrote in his memoir Unguarded. “He wasn’t happy and that’s an understatement. Although he was playing well, Horace wasn’t meeting Michael’s high expectations. Who could? And Michael, as it was shown over and over with other players in the ESPN doc, wasn’t shy about letting him know. 

“As for Horace, I never knew a player more sensitive to any slights, real or imagined. He despised the preferential treatment Michael received from Soug even more than I did. Michael and Horace had gotten into a pretty heated argument after a playoff loss to the Pistons in 1989.”

Jordan, Grant and Pippen won three straight NBA titles together in 1991, 1992 and 1993.

After the Bulls won the 1991 NBA championship against the Los Angeles Lakers, Jordan skipped the team’s trip to the White House and Grant wasn’t happy. 

“I’m very disappointed because it was a great honor for the whole city of Chicago as well as the Bulls organization,” Grant said in 1991. “Not to have your best player and your team leader there is just like sending somebody else besides George Bush to Saudi Arabia.”

Jordan was tough on Grant, very tough.

According to Sam Smith, author of “The Jordan Rules,” Jordan wouldn’t let Grant eat if he had a bad game. 

“Players would come to me over the years and said, ‘You know what he did? He took Horace’s food away on the plane because Horace had a bad game,’” Smith told KNBR. “[Michael] told the stewardesses, ‘Don’t feed him, he doesn’t deserve to eat.’ They would tell me stuff like that and they’d say, ‘Why don’t you write this?’ And I would say, ‘Well I can’t write it unless you say it.’ I don’t do league sources. You can’t do that kind of stuff on these kind of things. If you want to be quoted I’ve got no problem with that. ‘No, no, no we can’t say that about Michael Jordan.’”

Grant was never afraid to stand up to Jordan, which according to Smith, may be the reason Jordan blamed Grant for leaking stuff to Smith for Smith’s book.

“Also, to suggest that one player, who was certainly not privy to a lot of things going on, can be the source of information for a 300-page book about years of a team, some of which he wasn’t even involved in, it’s just ludicrous,” Smith told Alex Kennedy of HoopsHype. “But Michael singled him out on the broadcast because, you know, Horace was the one who would often stand up to Michael on behalf of the players. In practice, when Jordan sucker punched Will Perdue, Will was practically crying and didn’t fight back; Horace was the one who went to fight back. Horace wasn’t in the card games with Michael, wasn’t in his group and didn’t hang around with him, but he would stand up to him. Horace was going to be a Marine before he turned to basketball; that was always his dream.

“And that’s why he was so close with Johnny Bach, the military guy on the staff. Horace wasn’t as quick-witted as Michael or as sharp, but Michael didn’t like that Horace wasn’t intimidated by him. He’s still holding that grudge, just like he is with Isiah Thomas and Jerry Krause. We’re seeing Michael’s Festivus, ‘airing-of-grudges’ thing.”