TDK is simply lying (again) about Jordan's retirement. The following are all *direct* quotes from Jordan:
I’m just so tired,” he told Greene during the 1992 Finals:
“I’m so tried that even when it comes time to push myself, I feel the tiredness. … Rest isn’t the answer. What I need to do is get away from basketball on the days between the games. That’s why I’ve been going out and playing golf. … On the golf course I can think about something other than basketball. It’s the only way I know of that I can get rid of the mental part of the tiredness. I just want to get my concentration up and get this over and done with.”
By the middle of the 1993 season, Jordan had decided that no matter the season’s outcome, he was hanging them up. He even told teammates.
“And not just one night,” he told Melissa Isaacson during his baseball retirement. “We’d have a couple of beers after the game and they’d be complaining about this or that, pointing fingers as they liked to do, and I’d say, ‘Man, you don’t know how good you have it. You watch, I’m not going to be around here much longer. I think this is going to be my last year.’ And they’d say, ‘Sure MJ, sure.’ … I kept saying it. Not once, not twice, but three or four times. I could sense they didn’t believe me.”
“From a mental aspect, I needed the time away,” he told Cheryl Raye-Stout in October 1995. “Now I’m back with a clear mind, with a different feeling, a different attitude, a different appetite. I want to get back to where I was.”
“I saw it all over the place — the Star, Globe, all those tabloids,” he told Isaacson. “They didn’t show any sympathy for a situation that was very emotional. Here I just lost my father, and they were trying to connect it to something that was totally irrelevant. I felt they were trying to get at me instead of giving him the peace he deserved.”
Humorous for other reasons related to the thread's participants:
“I’ve had dreams in which I’m an alcoholic,” he told Bob Greene in one of many conversations that resulted in Greene’s book Hang Time, published in October 1992, the start of the third championship season.
“I’m an alcoholic in the dream, and because of it, all the things I’ve worked so hard for will be taken away. I wake up numb after those dreams. Those are the kind of dreams when you want to make yourself wake up, because they trouble you so badly. In the dreams I’m making bad mistakes, and I’m not perfect, but I don’t know what to do about it because I might lose everything.”
From his father:
“He knows he’s in the fishbowl under the microscope, but you should have some movement that’s not guarded all the time. You just have to say, hey, this guy’s human. I mean, what is enough? … Pretty soon, when you keep tipping the bucket up, there’s not going to be anything in there after a while. You’re going to pour it all out. And that’s what we should start realizing as fans.”
— James Jordan on Michael, 1993
https://readjack.substack.com/p/im-just ... el-jordans
To be blunt, Jordan's *observable behavior* directly contradicted the "I have nothing left to prove" narrative. Like I said, why the hell would you come back not even two years later if you had already proven everything (which he hadn't anyway, he had fewer rings than Magic, a lack of an eightpeat like Russell, and wasn't even considered a runaway GOAT vs. Russell and Kareem)? I can't find an electronic version of this, but Jordan told Dean Smith going into the 1993 season that he needed to "hurry up" if he wanted to watch Jordan play a pro game in person, like he claimed he wanted to do (it comes from Dean Smith's book "A Coach's Life as well as Jordan's book "For the Love of the Game").
All this stuff is just icing on the cake. The fact that he came back in 1995 completely confirms the "he broke" hypothesis. And you know what? *It's understandable*. I wouldn't even count it as being shameful. But it did happen.
So now we have logic derived from observable behaviors, testimony from people close to Jordan, and multiple quotes from Jordan himself.
What more do we need?
The truth: Jordan broke circa 1993ish. He built himself up again. Came back and rose again to be crowned the best player of the 1990s and a top 10 player all-time. He did that. But the chain of events was rise--broken--rebuild--rise again, not rise---too cool for school---even more rising upwards.
Edit: lol lol lol
... and no dummy, 3rd Party gossip doesn't trump the words spoken from the man himself.
