Everyone who knew who Michael Jordan was on the basketball court knows he could be intense at times. He was a tough leader, and that intensity sometimes spilled over onto his teammates. But one time, when he tried to go after Bill Cartwright, he was met with equally intense energy.
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Jordan expected the best from his teammates. It didn’t matter if they were a starter, a role player, or a benchwarmer—MJ expected everyone to perform at their highest level. It’s part of what made him such a fierce competitor.
However, recently, Stacey King detailed an instance when Jordan was suppressed, as he berated Cartwright during a timeout. The veteran big man had just mishandled a pass from MJ, and Jordan really let him have it.
“They’re walking to the bench, and Michael’s berating Bill, ‘You got to catch the f’ing ball! You’ve got to do this!’” King said, role-playing on the Gimme The Hot Sauce podcast.
“Just screaming at him. Now you’ve got to remember, Bill’s the older statesman and he’s the eldest player on this team. And he’s seen Michael berate guys. So, here he is being berated by a young Michael Jordan.”
It must have been embarrassing for the older player to get yelled at by one of the younger guys on the team. It’s not that Cartwright didn’t think he made a mistake—he knew he had messed up. But he believed his veteran presence would command more respect. Clearly, that wasn’t the case.
So, Cartwright responded to Jordan with the same kind of energy.
“Finally, Bill just snapped. And he says, ‘Hey! Let me tell you something. You ever talk to me like that again, I’m gonna rip your damn head off! No one talks to me like that.’ And Michael’s face, you would’ve thought he saw a ghost,” King recalled.
What a wild scene that King got to witness from the sidelines. Cartwright felt so disrespected that he actually threatened violence against Jordan—that’s how deeply MJ had gotten under his skin.
And there’s more lore between the two.
When Cartwright was traded to the Bulls in the summer of 1988 in exchange for Charles Oakley, Jordan made it clear he didn’t like the move. He saw Oakley as his enforcer and felt that bringing in an older player made the team worse.
Eventually, Jordan tried to get his teammates to stop passing Cartwright the ball in the final 2 minutes of games. It’s something Scottie Pippen wrote about in his book, Unguarded.
“He told the rest of us to stop passing the ball to Bill in the last few minutes of a game. Bill was a smart guy. He saw what was going on. He was ready to kill Michael, and I didn’t blame him,” Pippen wrote.
However, MJ couldn’t have been more wrong about Cartwright and how good the Bulls were after trading for him. They went on to win three straight titles together from 1991–93. He even admitted later on that he was wrong about his analysis of the trade.
At the end of the day, Jordan is just an uber-competitive person. He will do whatever it takes to win, even if that means demeaning his teammates or telling others to stop passing to a certain guy. But it was always with the mindset of trying to win.
It’s not a style that everyone should play with, though. When MJ spoke about his toughness on teammates years later in The Last Dance, he got emotional about the topic.
“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 want to play that way, don’t play that way,” Jordan said, choking up.
Wise and emotional words spoken from one of the greatest to ever play the game.
