Michael Jordan’s fame at his peak cannot be compared to the popularity of stars today. It did not matter whether you watched basketball or not. You still knew who His Airness was. MJ had this larger-than-life presence that made every dunk, every game-winner, and every commercial feel like a global event. The sport’s international growth can be traced back to Jordan leading the Dream Team to Olympic gold in 1992. So it is only natural that fans were obsessed with trying to get close to him.
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Jordan could very well be labeled as one of the most famous people on the planet in the 1990s. To those supporting the Chicago Bulls, he was nothing short of a god.
That level of fame did have a cost, though. “I can’t just move around, I can’t go to the grocery store, I can’t get out of this car and pump my gas without someone coming around,” Jordan famously said during an interview on the Oprah Winfrey Show. “Every day, little things we tend to take for granted. I can’t stop and get some coffee or go to a restaurant.”
That kind of lifestyle shift would have been tough for anyone. Yet the stories that came out of it are almost as legendary as the man himself. Actor and comedian Bill Bellamy shared a hilarious saga from a night out with MJ during his recent appearance on the 7PM In Brooklyn podcast with host Carmelo Anthony.
Bellamy recalled going out with MJ after he had just dropped a 50-point performance, when a group of strangers approached the Def Jam legend with a surprising favor.
“We in the restaurant, Mike smoked cigars then. Here go the guys, ‘Bell…can you ask Michael to sign our ball?’ I’m like, ‘I ain’t his assistant.’ They like, ‘Bill, can you ask him if he’ll take a picture with us?'” This made the group laugh, but Bellamy’s point was that his level of stardom didn’t come close to Michael’s.
“Seriously, that’s how it was. It was that kind of famous,” he stated. When co-host Kazeem Famuyide asked Bellamy if he got the guys the autograph, he shared the second portion of the story.
“He wasn’t doing that in the restaurant. Mike told em, ‘Man get out of here with your kid.’ I didn’t even know Mike cursed. ‘Man, get the f*** out.’ I was like, that’s Michael?”
It makes sense why he was so taken aback. Jordan’s PR training was top-notch. He never swore or showed aggression of any kind, so seeing the six-time NBA champion snap would catch anyone off guard.
Moments like that remind you how surreal Jordan’s world really was. The man could not sit down for dinner without someone shoving a basketball in his direction, and even the coolest celebrities were stunned when he finally lost his patience.
But that is the price of being that iconic. Whether you are Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Taylor Swift, or Beyoncé, the normal rules do not apply, and everyday life becomes a spectacle. And whether he was dropping 50 on the court or dropping a rare curse word off it, his legend only grew, creating stories people are still telling decades later.
