"The Oral History Of Michael Jordan’s Legendary ‘Flu Game’"
It’s one of those images that stays with you forever: Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player who ever lived, collapsing helplessly into the arms of Scottie Pippen following Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals. Ignoring the limitations of his flu-ravaged body, Jordan mustered a spectacular 38-point performance to elevate his Chicago Bulls over the Utah Jazz, paving the way for his fifth championship in seven years. Now, nearly two decades later, those who were there for the storied game have come together to describe what it was like to be part of history.
1. 40 Hours To Tipoff
Tim Grover (Bulls trainer): I was sleeping at the team’s hotel, and around 2 a.m. I got a phone call from Michael’s bodyguard. He told me that Dragonheart was about to come on HBO and that Michael wanted everybody to know. So I hung up and went back to sleep. Ten minutes later, he called me again, only this time something was wrong.
George Koehler (Jordan’s bodyguard): Mike was throwing up everywhere. He was flying around the room like a fire hose, throwing up on the curtains, the ceiling, everything. He threw up so hard that his eye popped out.
Michael Jordan: No one throws up better than Michael Jordan, and I proved it that night. I’m the best in the world at basketball and throwing up and crafts and swimming.
Tim Grover: It sounded like he might have a stomach bug, so I told George to give Michael an Alka-Seltzer and then touch base with me in the morning.
Phil Jackson (Bulls head coach): I remember I was watching Dragonheart in my hotel room and someone started pounding on my door. It was George, and he was shouting incoherently—something about the ice machine and Michael being naked.
George Koehler: Mike’s fever was out of control, so I carried him out into the hallway and tried to stuff him in the top of the ice machine to cool him down. He kept slipping out, though, so I just put him on the ground and dumped buckets of ice on him until he was buried.
Phil Jackson: My philosophy has always been to trust players to make their own choices. When I saw Michael that night, I simply told him that I respected his choice to lie naked and unresponsive beneath ice cubes. And that was that.
Tim Grover: The next morning, I checked in on Michael, and he looked absolutely disgusting. Just a wet, putrid raisin of a man, curled up naked in the hotel hallway. He’d probably lost 60 pounds since I’d last seen him, and hundreds of ants were crawling all over his face and body. He was missing an eye. But it didn’t worry me in the slightest. After all, this was Michael Jordan. Nothing could keep him down.
Michael Jordan: I’m not really sure how I got sick, but I do know that I was the sickest NBA player in the world at that point, and no one’s been sicker since. I call the commissioner three times a day to make sure.
George Koehler: How did Michael get sick? Go figure. He’d just been doing the same things he always does before big games: studying pictures of basketballs; talking game strategy with his three snakes; disassembling and reassembling phones. I do recall him eating linguine and clam sauce out of a duffel bag in the sauna, but that wouldn’t faze him. The guy’s invincible.
Scottie Pippen (Bulls forward): He was only going to eat a little linguine and clam sauce, but then he decided to eat 23 pounds of it, because 23 is his lucky number and he didn’t want to cause any plane crashes with his bad luck. But I don’t think that’s what made him sick. I’m convinced there was foul play.
Jerry Sloan (Jazz head coach): I’ve heard plenty of conspiracy theories over the years that we somehow poisoned Michael Jordan before that game, and they’re all absolutely true. [Jazz guard] Jeff Hornacek pretended he was room service and gave Michael a Gatorade bottle full of Lysol and dimethylmercury, and Michael finished it off in three giant gulps. Then he ordered five more bottles and finished those off, too. He tipped Jeff with a crisp $100 bill for each bottle, and we all thought that was incredibly cool.
Marcus Acker (basketball fan): I also poisoned Michael Jordan. We were staying at the same hotel as the team, and I wanted to do something to impress my two boys, Bradley and Keenan.
Here's the rest: http://www.clickhole.com/article/oral-h ... -game-2393
