Toward the end of the seventh episode of last year’s hit documentary series The Last Dance, Michael Jordan considers the question of whether or not his infamous intensity came at the expense of being perceived as a “nice guy.” “When people see this, they gonna say, ‘He wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ Well, that’s you, because you never won anything,” Jordan says. “I wanted to win.” Then, in one of the most striking moments from the series, Jordan becomes suddenly unguarded. “That’s how I played the game. That was my mentality,” he says, before his eyes suddenly well up, and he begins to tremble. "If you don’t want to play that way, don’t play that way.”
Jordan himself seemed to have been taken aback by his emotions, but it is perhaps because he is confronted with a tragic understanding. “He couldn’t have been nice,” teammate B.J. Armstrong says earlier. “With that kind of mentality he had, he can’t be a nice guy.” Throughout this sequence, one might think of the iconic clip of Jordan, utterly spent, crying as he rests his head on his first ever Finals Trophy after his 1991 championship win. For Michael Jordan, winning at all costs meant it was necessary to forgo being a certain type of person — in his vision, in the mold that he single-handedly popularized, one could not worry about being an asshole if you are determined to be the best.
