Remembering Michael Jordan's first retirement from the NBA 30 years ago (2024)

Magic warned us.

This was during the 1993 NBA Finals. The Chicago Bulls and New York Knicks had just finished their knock-down, drag-out fight for supremacy in the Eastern Conference. Chicago had what New York wanted, and the Knicks swarmed the Bulls. But the Bulls bit back. And like the fight scene in that great campy movie “They Live,” it went on for hours.

But the Bulls eliminated the Knicks in six games. NBC covered the finals — covered Michael Jordan, really, who are we kidding? — as Chicago matched up with the Phoenix Suns in the championship series.

And Magic Johnson was there, doing a gap year with the network as a game analyst after opting not to play in the 1992-93 season. He had a star turn at the Olympics in Barcelona in the summer of 1992 after disclosing months earlier that he’d contracted HIV, but after getting cut on his arm during an exhibition game with the Lakers in the fall of ’92, he re-retired. He had time on his hands.

We were in Chicago. More accurately, Deerfield, Ill., a suburb about 30 miles north of the city. That’s where the Bulls practiced back then, at The Berto Center. And, no, it likely was not a coincidence that Jordan lived about 10 minutes from there.

It was an off day, and Magic was there as part of his prep work. He knew Jordan well, as a competitor and as an Olympic teammate on the Dream Team. We needed a Jordan translator at the time because Jordan wasn’t talking to the media. Jordan was angry because of coverage of a tell-all book by a businessman who had golfed with him, allegedly won $1 million from him and then wrote about their supposed joint gambling “addiction.” He also was upset about a column early in the Knicks series criticizing him for going to Atlantic City to gamble the night before Game 2.

This had come on top of Jordan having to acknowledge in court — during a 1992 trial of a man who played golf with him multiple times over the past few years — that a $57,000 check Jordan had given the man in ’91 was not a loan for the man to build a driving range, as Jordan had asserted to the media previously, but a repayment of gambling debts Jordan had incurred playing golf and poker with him. At the time, Jordan was seething about his portrayal in a not-small segment of the media as an out-of-control gambler. He wasn’t talking.

And thus Magic, almost always willing to speak to the media, stood among a handful of reporters, talking after practice. This wasn’t an interview session, just Magic and some guys he knew and with whom he was friendly. Magic was solemn.

I don’t remember the exact quote, but the gist of it was, “If y’all don’t ease up, y’all are gonna drive him out of the game.”

It was a different time then. No cellphones were recording every second of our interactions. No one had a handheld camera filming for a reality show. Just a bunch of dopes in warm-up suits, T-shirts and jeans … and Magic, chopping it up for a few minutes. No one blogged about it later — because there were no blogs — and I doubt anyone gave what Magic said a second thought. Jordan and the Bulls were on the verge of a three-peat, something that no team had done since Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics in the 1960s. As great as Magic and Larry Bird were, neither of them led their teams to three in a row.

In 1993, Jordan was the biggest thing in … everything. He’d vaulted way past stardom to something completely different, a new club with a handful of members. Maybe Tom Cruise? Or Madonna? He’d made Nike into a colossus, and he’d done the same with the Bulls.

With his voracious need not just to win but to conquer, Chicago would keep winning championships for a very long time. No one outside his circle believed he’d walk away from the game, the competition, the chance to show, night after night, how dominant he stood over the NBA landscape.

Yet four months later, on Oct. 6, 1993, after winning his third straight title with the Bulls, Michael Jordan — only 30 years old — walked away, retiring from the NBA after nine seasons.

Amazingly, that happened 30 years ago today.

It was hard to believe, even as other outlets confirmed the original scoop from Mike Monroe, now our colleague at The Athletic, then The Denver Post’s NBA writer, who wrote a story the night of Oct. 5, just before the start of Game 1 of the American League Championship Series between the Chicago White Sox and Toronto Blue Jays. Jordan had thrown out the first pitch that night at Comiskey Park before watching the game from a suite.

Well, most of it. When the story broke, Jordan quickly left the stadium.

The only analogous sports earthquake to Jordan’s sudden departure was Jim Brown’s in 1966, when the Cleveland Browns legend, also 30 at the time, abruptly retired from the NFL. Yet Jordan’s stardom, a by-product of an exploding worldwide media, dwarfed Brown’s.

It had been a harrowing few weeks for Jordan, even after the ultimate triumph of Chicago beating Phoenix in six games. A month later, Jordan’s father, James, disappeared while driving back from a funeral in Wilmington, N.C., to his home in Charlotte. The next day, James was scheduled to fly to Chicago for a charity event, but he didn’t make the flight. Hours, then days, went by without James contacting anyone in the family.

On Aug. 3, James Jordan’s body was found in a creek near McColl, S.C. He had been murdered, shot in the chest, likely in his car, as he slept on the side of a highway.

Two teenagers, who’d made several phone calls from the car phone inside James’ Lexus, were arrested. One pled guilty to the murder charge against him and agreed to testify against the other. Both were sentenced to life in prison for the murder.

James’ death shattered Michael’s world. He was as close to his father as a son could be. They shared the same mannerisms, including the famous tongue that came out when each was working. In 1993, reporters often sought out James’ observations while his famous son shut out the media.

His dad had been with him during each of the Bulls’ championship runs. Andrew Bernstein’s iconic photo of a weeping Jordan, cradling the Larry O’Brien Trophy after Chicago’s first championship over the Lakers in 1991, shows James next to his son as always.

Two years later, his son, still grieving, having recoiled from the backlash of becoming one of the most famous people on earth, called it quits.

On Oct. 6, there was Jordan, in a suit at a podium at The Berto Center with his then-wife Juanita, commissioner David Stern, Bulls governor Jerry Reinsdorf, general manager Jerry Krause and head coach Phil Jackson all sitting beside him, along with many of Jordan’s teammates — from Scottie Pippen to Bill Cartwright and John Paxson — in attendance.

Jordan said he’d lost the “sense of motivation” to keep playing.

“It’s not because I don’t love the game,” he said during his news conference. “I love the game of basketball. I always will. I just feel that, at this particular time in my career, I have reached the pinnacle of my career. I have achieved a lot in that short amount of time if you want to call it short. But, I just feel that I don’t have anything else for myself to prove.”

Jordan said he probably would have opted to leave even if his father was still alive, that he had been thinking about walking away for some time. He told his dad he was leaning toward retiring after beating the Suns. But he left some ambiguity about a potential return to basketball.

“Will I ever unretire? I don’t know,” he said. “If I desire to come back and play again, maybe that’s what I want to do. Maybe that’s the challenge that I may need someday down the road. I’m not going to close that door.”

He also made it clear that he was still angry with the media.

“I’ve always said that I would never let you guys run me out of the game,” he said. “So don’t think that you’ve done that. This is my choice.”

1993 was peak Michael Jordan:

“If you don’t put us as one of the history teams, then forget cha” 😂

Regular Season:
32.6 ppg , 5.5 asst, 6.7 rebs

Round 1 vs Hawks: 34.3 ppg
ECSF vs Cavs : 31.0 ppg
ECF vs Knicks: 32.1 ppg
NBA Finals vs Suns: 41.0 ppgpic.twitter.com/rN1I2a0p1f

— Randy Cruz (@randyjcruz) September 25, 2023

Whether you believed Magic or Michael about what made him leave seemed immaterial at the moment. The NBA was losing its bell cow. Imagine Beyoncé or Taylor Swift announcing, basically out of the blue, that they were leaving the business. What would that feel like to the Beyhive or the Swifties? What would that do to the music industry? And as with Beyoncé and Swift, Jordan drew in millions of casual fans, who knew little about the strategies of the game, but reveled in his craftsmanship and artistry.

And Jordan always owned the biggest moments, even if he no longer flew as high or for as long as he had when he came into the league.

Consider: The most important play of Game 6 of the finals vs. the Suns was not Paxson’s game-winning 3, as memorable as it was. It was the play before — Jordan’s coast-to-coast driving layup with Chicago trailing 98-94 in the final minute. Jordan grabbed a Suns miss with 43.7 seconds left, then scored seconds later. End to end in 5.6 seconds, which allowed the Bulls to go 2-for-1, rather than needing to foul Phoenix to get the ball back.

Also, Paxson’s 3 represented the only points scored in the fourth quarter by a Bulls player other than Jordan.

“Physically, I was getting exhausted. Mentally, I was way past exhausted,” Jordan said of that 1992-93 season, in Episode 6 of “The Last Dance,” the 10-part series on Jordan and the Bulls.

The NBA still had superstar teams and players in the wake of Jordan’s retirement. It got the great fortune the following season to have the Knicks, from the No. 1 media market, make the finals. But the Knicks’ series against the Houston Rockets was overshadowed, overwhelmed, by the saga of another former superstar athlete, one who’d reached a level of affable celebrity like Jordan back in his day. NBC interrupted coverage of the Knicks and Rockets in a pivotal Game 5 on June 17, 1994. A white Ford Bronco was driving down the 405 in California — and many of us opted to follow that story that night and in the days that followed, rather than the finals.

There could be no greater evidence that Michael Jordan was no longer on the scene.

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Lou Capozzola and Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE via Getty Images)