The NBA seems to be a much more friendlier place than it used to be. At least that’s what many former players keep saying. Certainly, the 1980s and the ’90s were famous for some of the most bitter rivalries the league has ever seen. Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas vs. Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing vs. Jordan… the list is pretty long. Alonzo Mourning revealed that the desire to outdo each other was so fierce that Jordan wouldn’t even shake his hand before games.
Advertisement
Zo opened up to Shaquille O’Neal on how Jordan and Scottie Pippen had refused to acknowledge him before the jump ball during the Miami Heat-Chicago Bulls playoff games in the 1990s. Of course, those days the players never used to hug each other like today. At the most, it would be a bump of fists, or a handshake.
“Scottie and Michael wouldn’t even shake my hands at jump ball. They refused. They looked at me and I went in and they walked away. So now everybody’s hugging, Kumbaya, ‘Hey man, good to see you’ and all that. We didn’t do all that. It was a fist bump and keep it moving,” said Mourning on The Big Podcast with Shaq.
Jordan’s cold treatment of Mourning had a bit of history, a personal tiff. It had begun a few years prior with Alonzo, playing for Charlotte Hornets at the time, blocking a shot by the Bulls star. MJ retaliated with a poster over Alonzo in their next outing. This panned out during regular season in 1993. And Zo’s explanation for why Jordan yelled after the dunk shows how heated the rivalry was.
“Yeah Mike dunked on me. But he knew I was there. That’s why he got all hyped. He knew I was in there. A couple of games back, we played them and I was blocking his shot.”
In some ways, the league has lost a unique side of its marketability because of the lack of fierce on-court rivalries. The 1980s and ’90s were hugely successful in this. The NBA would build storylines off the rivalries. This led to the fans tuning in by the millions to watch players with intense on-court distaste take on each other.
The stalwarts from those days claim that the fierce competition and rivalries were what made them loyal fans in the first place.
Nobody did rivalries like the NBA in the ’90s
The rivalry between MJ’s Bulls and Ewing’s New York Knicks in the late 1990s was legendary. While the duo and many of their teammates would regularly eat dinner together, Jordan once claimed that it didn’t stop them from being fiercely competitive on court.
Jordan used Charles Oakley as an example and said, “I actually do like them. Oakely almost tried to take my head off every time we played, and we’d go get dinner afterward.”
MJ’s words also reiterate Mourning’s point about rivalries.
The fact that players in the ’90s were able to compete with each other fiercely and still remain friends off it made that era of basketball truly special. Current fans are missing out on this additional layer of the game, one that presents duels out of matchups in a truly gladiatorial sense.
