The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [39]
No basketball player in the prime of his career had ever voluntarily walked away like Michael Jordan did on October 6, 1993, days before training camp for the 1993-94 season started. Strange days, indeed.
Of the few athletes that had ever reached Jordan-like status in their sports, the few that had retired young were usually forced to due to health reasons, which was the case with the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax. The great running back Jim Brown retired after nine years with the Cleveland Browns, and that seems to be the closest parallel to Jordan. When Brown retired, he signed a multimovie deal with Paramount Pictures. His first role was in The Dirty Dozen. (By the way, for those interested in astrology or numerology, Jordan and Brown share a birthday: February 17.)
There were a few all-time greats in individual sports that retired prematurely (Bobby Jones in golf and Bjorn Borg in tennis, for example) but even there, it was the rarity. As Isiah Thomas told me once, “Most great athletes leave on a stretcher.” In other words, they leave when they can no longer compete physically.
Unlike Brown, who left the NFL for a blossoming movie career, or Jones, who retired from competitive golf in 1930 for a career in law, Jordan was evasive about his post-NBA career. He talked at his press conference about having achieved everything he could in basketball and “wanting to spend more time with his family.”
The one aspect of Jordan’s retirement that no one can judge is the grief he felt after his father was murdered. In July of 1993, James Jordan pulled over to sleep on the side of the road after midnight, headed just a few hundred miles to Charlotte, North Carolina. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, the victim of two young men intent on robbing and shooting someone.
Additionally, Michael Jordan was physically and mentally overwhelmed when training camp approached in October of 1993. Jordan had put everything he had into the three previous championship seasons—meaning his seasons stretched until mid-June. And he had spent the entire summer of 1992 playing for the U.S. Olympic team at the Barcelona games.
When Jordan retired, NBA Deputy Commissioner Russ Granick told the press that Jordan had called the commissioner to tell him his intentions. Granick then said: “Whether it’s permanent or not remains to be seen.” That was an odd thing for Granick to say, unless he knew something that others did not.
The 1997 book Money Players: Days and Nights Inside the New NBA by Harvey Araton, Armen Keteyan, and Martin Dardis set up the situation.
Did he, as he claimed, simply want a chance to move on with his life, get closer to his family, and take a swing at becoming a Major League baseball player? Was some clandestine deal cut between [Commissioner David] Stern and Jordan to allow the stench of Jordan’s gambling sprees to go away? Or did Jordan, knowing he would soon be suspended, if only for the sake of the league’s saving face, decide to show Stern who was calling the shots and walk away on his own?
I’ll remind you why there may have been questions about whether Stern would let Jordan back in the league: It concerned Jordan’s ongoing gambling investigation. Remember, Jordan admitted writing a $57,000 check to a convicted cocaine dealer named Slim Bouler. Jordan at first said it was a loan to help Bouler build a driving range, but it eventually came to light that it was a repayment of a gambling debt. That would have been bad enough, but then a man named Richard Esquinas came forward with even more revealing info. Esquinas self-published a book claiming that he had won over $1 million in golf bets with Jordan. He claimed that the great basketball star didn’t make good on all the money, either.
Jordan’s response at the time was a statement that said, “Because