Michael Jordan Didn’t Hang Out With Bulls Teammates Off The Court: ‘He Didn’t Really Mingle With Teammates At All’

NBA icon Michael Jordan didn’t hang out with his Chicago Bulls teammates off the court. 

Jordan spent more time with Bulls security. 

“He basically hung around with his security people as you saw when he was gambling with them,” Hall of Fame Bulls writer Sam Smith told Alex Kennedy of HoopHype in 2020. “He didn’t really mingle with teammates at all. I remember some of the Bulls players during the second three-peat telling me that they’d never talked to him other than on the basketball court when he was yelling at them. They’d never seen him off the court. That was later on… But the point was that he could insulate himself at times, if he needed to and wanted to. But that’s the price of celebrity in our society. If you’re Jack Nicholson or whatever and you go somewhere, you’re a movie star so everyone’s staring at you and wants to feel like they know you. And so that became Michael Jordan. Look, he couldn’t have disliked the life that much since he kept coming back!”

The beginning of Episode 6 of ESPN’s “The Last Dance” docuseries showed an old Jordan commercial where the NBA legend spoke about his life not being as fun as everybody thought it was.

If you value your privacy, being Jordan when he was the most popular athlete in the world in the ’90s would have been a nightmare.

“It’s funny, a lot of people say they’d like to be Michael Jordan for a day or for a week, but let them try to be Michael Jordan for a year, see if they like it,” Jordan said in the commercial. “I don’t think you can see the true Michael Jordan for just a day. I don’t think they quite understand it’s no fun.”

Jordan only experienced peace when he was at home with his family or in his hotel room on the road. Besides those two venues, Jordan was under pressure to be on with people all the time and Bulls senior director of public and media relations, Tim Hallam, saw it first-hand in the ’90s.

Almost everyone wanted to be like Jordan back in the day, which is why Gatorade came out with the “Be Like Mike” commercial. However, Hallam was one of the few people who knew that being Jordan was an “impossible task.”

“I think what people don’t realize is that from the moment Michael Jordan leaves his hotel room, the spotlight is on him,” Hallam said in The Last Dance. “Everybody in the world wanted to either see him, talk to him. They all wanted a piece of him in some way or another. He was under pressure to be on all the time with people. I wouldn’t want to be like Mike. It’s an impossible task.”

Jordan is first in NBA history in points per game, fourth in steals, fifth in field goals and second in player efficiency rating. He holds the NBA record for most points (63) scored in a playoff game. 

Jordan has career averages of 30.1 points, 6.2 rebounds, 5.3 assists, 2.3 steals and 0.8 blocks with the Bulls and Washington Wizards. He won five MVPs, one Rookie of the Year Award, one Defensive Player of the Year Award, six championships, six Finals MVPs, 10 scoring titles and three steals titles.