Sam Smith did not just witness how Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls gradually rose to prominence during his time as a beat writer for the team. He also discovered the other side of Jordan, the one that the media and fans didn’t get to see.
Smith’s work also saw him getting a front-row seat to Jordan’s evolution as an NBA product. In the public eye, Jordan was the NBA poster boy, but according to Smith, that wasn’t the man he knew while covering the Bulls and traveling with the team.
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Despite realizing that the duality of Jordan’s personality was worth writing about, Smith was smart enough not to do so. At the time, Smith already knew what he would’ve put himself into if he had publicized MJ’s other side while the Bulls superstar was at the pinnacle of success.
“Michael then was really sold well. He was in commercials. He was doing McDonalds and Chevrolet and Coca-Cola. There was the famous one where he delivered Cokes to a tree house — he jumped up into the tree house. He has a beautiful smile and is depicted as this perfect guy. I’d been around the team and knew he wasn’t quite that way,” Smith divulged in an interview in 2011. “He could be very difficult. Players would complain to me about it. He would humiliate them at times.”
“I would tell people these stories and people would say, ‘How come you don’t write [about that]’ and I would explain, ‘The team’s winning and you can’t write that in an 800-word newspaper story every day.’ It just didn’t seem to fit,” he continued.
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Smith doesn’t personally hate Jordan
Smith started covering Jordan and the Bulls full-time in 1987.
Though he diligently documented every information and story he gathered from the Bulls players themselves, his work didn’t really gain much traction. All that changed when he wrote the infamous The Jordan Rules.
At last, Smith finally found a way to let his audience know about who Jordan was behind the camera. The book was published in 1992, following the Bulls’ first NBA championship in franchise history. In it, Smith delved into the off-the-court stories, including accounts in which Jordan was described in a bad light.
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As expected, many began to criticize Smith, while others were stunned to discover the other side of MJ. In his defense, Smith argued that the book was never meant to personally attack His Airness.
In fact, he even enjoyed his time covering MJ. For Smith, The Jordan Rules was just another product of honest and unfiltered journalistic work.
“I liked Jordan a lot,” Smith opened up. “He came out of a very stable family, a very stable basketball program and when he came to the Bulls he really wanted to be a guy to just fit in and play.”
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“As an investigative reporter, my own background that I had, I was a little more aware and interested in stuff than I think other writers are or were,” he explained. “I recognized this story going on that I couldn’t quite write in the paper, that Jordan was not a bad guy, but he wasn’t quite what he was depicted as.”
MJ’s public image remains pristine
Smith was well aware that Jordan might not have appreciated how he portrayed him in his controversial book. However, he also believes his work did nothing to affect how the public views MJ.
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No matter what people say about him, Smith insists that he was in no way defaming Jordan back then. Perhaps the impact of The Jordan Rules was just hard to deny. However, while it is true that what the book has done to Jordan’s public image could no longer be reversed, Smith stressed that MJ was still adored by many.
Smith once acknowledged that Jordan has grown bigger than the sport itself to the point where it’s impossible to even match his impact on society. For Sam, even the unbelievable LeBron James couldn’t reach MJ’s level in terms of fame, success and influence.
“I’ve never seen anybody skipping down in the commercials, saying, ‘Be like LeBron,'” Smith told The New Yorker in 2020. “Obviously, it was commercial and marketing and all, but Jordan changed so much in the world and society — the long shorts, the shaved head and obviously, the sneakers.”
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“The sneakers were a revolution,” he pointed out. “Nobody thought that sneakers would be a fashion statement back in the early nineteen-eighties. Nobody thought it mattered if you put a player’s name on a sneaker.”
In retrospect, it’s understandable why Smith felt compelled to disclose as much as he could about Jordan as an athlete, teammate and person. By doing so, he found great success in sending the message he wanted to convey.
Truth be told, Smith just did his job and at the end of the day, it would all boil down to how the audience would take and digest it. Regardless, Jordan’s legacy has already been cemented and it might be a daunting and herculean task for any journalist to even imply something that would change how the people see the greatest basketball player of all time.
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For the record, it is worth noting that Jordan never harbored any animosity towards Smith after all. In fact, MJ even let Smith talk about him once again in the acclaimed Jordan and the Bulls documentary, The Last Dance.
This story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Sep 13, 2025, where it first appeared in the Off The Court section. Add Basketball Network as a Preferred Source by clicking here.