Michael Jordan Wouldn’t Let Stewardesses Give Horace Grant Food On Bulls Plane If Grant Had A Bad Game: ‘Don’t Feed Him, He Doesn’t Deserve To Eat’

NBA legend Michael Jordan wouldn’t let stewardesses give Horace Grant food on the Chicago Bulls plane if Grant had a bad game. 

Jordan was very tough on Grant. 

“Players would come to me over the years and said, ‘You know what he did? He took Horace’s food away on the plane because Horace had a bad game,’” Sam Smith, author of The Jordan Rules, told KNBR. “[Michael] told the stewardesses, ‘Don’t feed him, he doesn’t deserve to eat.’ They would tell me stuff like that and they’d say, ‘Why don’t you write this?’ And I would say, ‘Well I can’t write it unless you say it.’ I don’t do league sources. You can’t do that kind of stuff on these kind of things. If you want to be quoted I’ve got no problem with that. ‘No, no, no we can’t say that about Michael Jordan.'”

Jordan and Grant won three championships on the Bulls in 1991, 1992 and 1993. 

However, they didn’t have the best relationship. 

Grant was upset Jordan didn’t go to the White House after the Bulls won the 1991 NBA championship against the Los Angeles Lakers in five games. Here’s what Grant said after Jordan skipped the Bulls’ White House visit: 

“I’m very disappointed because it was a great honor for the whole city of Chicago as well as the Bulls organization. Not to have your best player and your team leader there is just like sending somebody else besides George Bush to Saudi Arabia.”

Grant left the Bulls for the Orlando Magic in the summer of 1994. He won his fourth NBA title in 2001 with the Lakers. 

Meanwhile, Jordan won three more championships with the Bulls in 1997, 1997 and 1998. 

Jordan crossed the line several times during his Bulls career. He punched Will Perdue and Steve Kerr and told teammates not to pass the ball to Bill Cartwright in crunch time. 

However, Jordan’s intense leadership style worked, as the Bulls won six titles, went undefeated in the NBA Finals and three-peated twice in the ’90s under his watch. 

“I pulled people along when they didn’t wanna be pulled,” Jordan said in The Last Dance. “I challenged people when they didn’t wanna be challenged and I earned that right because my teammates came after me. They didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you join the team, you live at a certain standard that I play the game and I wasn’t gonna take anything less.

“Now, if that means I had to go in and get in your a** a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates, the one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something that he didn’t f—ing do. When people see this, they gonna say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ Well, that’s you because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well. Look, I don’t have to do this. I’m only doing it because it is who I am. That’s how I played the game. That was my mentality. If you don’t wanna play that way, don’t play that way.”

Jordan won six championships, six Finals MVPs, five MVPs, 10 scoring titles, three steals titles and one Defensive Player of the Year Award with the Bulls. 

MJ is first in NBA history in points per game in the regular season and playoffs.