Robert Parish Wasn’t Impressed With Michael Jordan’s Trash Talk
You can’t intimidate a guy who played with Kevin McHale
Former Bulls big man Horace Grant gave an interview with a Chicago radio station yesterday where he basically laid waste to The Last Dance. Grant described the film as a “so-called documentary,” called Michael Jordan a “snitch” and said Scottie Pippen was “portrayed so badly.”
The overarching theme of Grant’s gripes was that the film was told too much from Jordan’s side. For instance, Grant said the doc overstated Jordan’s verbal abuse of his teammates. Sure, younger, more timid players like Steve Kerr, Will Perdue and Scott Burrell endured their fair share of bullying from MJ. But Grant says there were plenty of guys who fired right back at Jordan.
“I would say [it was] entertaining, but we know, who was there as teammates, that about 90% of it—I don't know if I can say it on air, but B.S. in terms of the realness of it,” Grant said. “It wasn't real—because a lot of things [Jordan] said to some of his teammates, that his teammates went back at him. But all of that was kind of edited out of the documentary, if you want to call it a documentary.”
On the topic of Jordan telling flight attendants not to feed Grant after bad games, Grant says he didn’t take Jordan’s abuse laying down.
“I went right back at him. I said some choice words that I won't repeat here,” Grant said. “But I said some choice words and stood up. ‘If you want it, you come and get it.’ And of course, he didn't move. He was just barking. But that was the story.”
Grant’s interview makes a 2012 Robert Parish interview relevant again. (An excerpt has been going around on Twitter.) Parish, the Hall of Famer who won three rings with Larry Bird’s Celtics, played his final NBA season with the Bulls in 1996–97 at age 43. He told ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan in 2012 that Jordan tried the tough guy thing with him but it didn’t work.
In one of his first practices with the Bulls, Parish botched one of the plays and was amused to find Jordan jawing at him just inches from his face.
“I told him, ‘I’m not as enamored with you as these other guys. I’ve got some rings too,’” Parish recalled. “At that point he told me, ‘I’m going to kick your ass.’ I took one step closer and said, ‘No, you really aren’t.’ After that he didn't bother me.”
Parish expanded on the incident in April in an interview on the “Locked on Celtics” podcast.
“Michael has a tendency to test his teammates, especially the new faces on the team,” he said. “I think it was more of a test than a threat. He was testing my reaction to his being a bully.... I didn’t read anything into it. I think it was just a test to see how I would respond.”
A story like that—or Grant’s assertion that teammates fought back against Jordan—would have made the section in the film about MJ’s bullying so much more interesting. It presents a fuller and more complicated view of Jordan, but it’s not the depiction Jordan would want. Admitting that Jordan’s teammates weren’t afraid to give him a taste of his own medicine ruins the illusion that they viewed him as a god. If Parish or Grant can feel comfortable firing back at MJ, then Jordan isn’t a superhuman whose underlings cower at his feet. He’s just an asshole.
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