While Michael Jordan’s “tough-as-nails” personality has been popular among NBA fans, Spike Lee’s attention to detail as a direction is well-known too. From 1988-91, these two performed in Lee’s Mars Blackmon-Jordan Nike advertisement series. The first shoot between them brought Michael Jordan to the edge as the renowned director extracted a ton of Jordan’s energy. For his desired shot, Spike Lee made Jordan dunk a whopping 100 times, which irked even one of the most resilient athletes of all time.
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This is why Jordan suggested his former friend Charles Barkley do just one dunk or else “Spike Lee will kill you.” While sneaker shopping with Complex’s Joe La Puma, Spike Lee narrated the time when he made Jordan do about 100 dunks for Nike during his first commercial and how MJ reacted. The Do the Right Thing director told Joe La Puma,
“It was my first commercial, I didn’t even know what I was doing and I had Michael Jordan doing dunks like, he must have done 100 dunks. After that, he said, ‘Spike from now on I am getting one more fu**in’ dunk!’ Then I did a commercial with Charles Barkley, he told Barkley “Spike is gonna kill you! Give him one dunk.”
Therefore, Spike Lee’s first encounter with Michael Jordan turned into an exhaustive endeavor for Air Jordan. The Knicks superfan would get on Jordan’s nerves in multiple ways. During their initial ad shoots, the coveted director also learned about Jordan’s ferocious hooping nature first-up.
Michael Jordan punished Spike Lee
During a TNT interview, in March 1988, Spike Lee touched more upon shooting his first commercial with the Bulls legend. The man, who played the role of Mars Blackmon in the famous “Hang Time”, dared to block MJ’s dunk out of the blue during the first shot. This irked MJ so much that he taught the director-actor a lesson for daring to register a rejection over him without a prompt.
A clip by Michael Jordan’s YouTube fan account covers Lee’s narration to TNT’s Skip Caray and Rick Barry.
“There’s another commercial called “Hang Time” where I’m hanging on to the rim and the first time he tried to dunk I blocked it so next eight takes he threw it down each time harder inside a bruised chest by the time we finished that day.”
Thus, the New York Knicks diehard fan had rather tense encounters with Michael Jordan. It was clear that the Knicks-Bulls rivalry was in full flow during the shoots. Considering the competitive and confrontative nature of both superstars, these stories align with the expectations.
