The “flu game” of Michael Jordan still remains a mystery as his trainer calls it food poisoning due to a bad pizza but the pizza maker swears it wasn’t.
Advertisement
Michael Jordan could do everything on the court in the 90s and still would leave only a few in surprise. The majority of fans had seen the GOAT in making for more than a decade and knew “His Airness” had no ceiling when it came to basketball.
Yet MJ managed to surprise many when he showed up looking sick during Game 5 of the 1997 NBA finals. How would he have missed the game when the series was 2-2, and they had to play an away game?
No. 23 went off 23 years ago 🍕
The “flu game” will be remembered as one of Jordan’s all-time performances pic.twitter.com/SPkRPh7b8e
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) June 11, 2020
He did play the game and almost all of it, without even getting rest while suffering from flu. The famous “flu game” of MJ was a part of “The Last Dance” documentary as well.
But subsequently, Jordan’s personal trainer said it was food poisoning and not flu, that got his client.
“Out of everybody in the room, he was the only one that ate. Nobody else … then 2 o’clock in the morning, I get a call to my room. I come to the room, he’s curled up, he’s curled up in the fetal position. We’re looking at him. We’re finding the team physician at that time. And immediately I said, ‘It’s food poisoning.’ Guaranteed. Not the flu.” Tim Grover said.
Tim Grover believes Michael Jordan had food poisoning because of pizza
Grover went one step further and claimed that the pizza Jordan had something shady about it, because of the way of its delivery. He alleged that he opened the door to collect the pizza order and found 5 men standing on the door to deliver it.
“So we order a pizza, they come to deliver it, five guys come to deliver this pizza. And I’m just … I take the pizza, and I tell them, I said, ‘I got a bad feeling about this.’ I said, ‘I just got a bad feeling about this.’”
The man who made the delivery might have been a Utah resident but was a hard-core Chicago Bulls fan. According to Sports Illustrated Craig Fite, came forward voluntarily after watching the final episode of the Last Dance, first on Facebook and then on “the Big Show” and told his side of things.
Fite who was an assistant manager of the Pizza Hut in Park City, being the only Bulls fan in his workplace, himself made sure to pick up every call they got whenever Bulls visited Salt Lake.
And when the call came from a hotel everyone in the city basically knew for Bulls players’ stay during the Finals, Fite made sure he was the one making Pizza for Flight.
“I said, ‘Well, I’m delivering it’,” Fite recalled. “I remember saying this: ‘I will make the pizza because I don’t want any of you (other employees) doing anything to it.’ And then I told the driver, you’re going to take me there.”
And that driver was the only man he says he went to deliver the pizza with.
Fite said it wasn’t his Pizza that got MJ sick
The stories that both Grover and Fite described of the situation match up to the 5-guys part. The poor lad says he was only with the driver when he delivered the food and asked Grover to say “hello” to Jordan, to which Tim did open the door wide open to let the duo have a look at Mike.
While he got a glimpse of MJ, Fite says that it could have been cigars, open windows, or the tank tops that got his favorite player sick, but not his pizza.
“Did you get it diagnosed? Did you go to the doctor? All this is innuendo on their part,” Fite said. “One thing I remind everybody is, he was smoking so many cigars. They had windows open. He didn’t have a shirt on, or he was in a tank top. At around 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon in Park City, the sun is gone behind that mountain, so it gets colder up there.”
The man is sure and probably the only person in his proper senses at that moment. And if he says he made the pizza well, he made the pizza well.
“Or they could have brought him food from somewhere else if it really was food poisoning,” Fite continued. “But that pizza was made well. I followed all the rules.”
Whatever happened that day might always be a mystery, but an unwell Jordan dropped 38 points in 44 minutes to lead his team to a 90-88 win over Karl Malone and the Jazz team. That incident did no harm to MJ’s legacy, only it enhanced it.
The Bulls won the next game as well to win their second consecutive title and then the next season’s title as well to make it their second 3-peat in 8 years. Jordan was the Finals MVP for all the 6 championships.
