Michael Jordan Wouldn’t Let Horace Grant Eat Food On Bulls Plane If He Had A Bad Game: ‘He Doesn’t Deserve To Eat’

NBA icon Michael Jordan told a stewardess on a Chicago Bulls plane not to give Horace Grant food after a bad game. 

Jordan was tough on Grant. 

Hall of Fame writer Sam Smith, author of “The Jordan Rules,” talked about Jordan and Grant in 2020 while “The Last Dance” aired. 

“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.'”

Jordan and Grant won three championships on the Bulls.

However, they didn’t have the best relationship. 

Grant was upset Jordan didn’t go to the White House after the Bulls won the 1991 NBA championship.

Here’s what Grant said after Jordan skipped the Bulls’ White House visit: 

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

Jordan crossed the line several times during his playing career. He punched Will Perdue and Steve Kerr and told teammates not to pass the ball to Bill Cartwright in crunch time. 

However, Jordan’s passionate leadership style worked, as the Bulls won six rings, went undefeated in the NBA Finals and three-peated twice in the ’90s. 

“I pulled people along when they didn’t wanna be pulled,” Jordan said in The Last Dance. “I challenged people when they didn’t wanna be challenged and I earned that right because my teammates came after me. They didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you join the team, you live at a certain standard that I play the game and I wasn’t gonna take anything less.

“Now, if that means I had to go in and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates, the one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something that he didn’t f—ing do. When people see this, they gonna say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ Well, that’s you because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well. Look, I don’t have to do this. I’m only doing it because it is who I am. That’s how I played the game. That was my mentality. If you don’t wanna play that way, don’t play that way.”