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It's always a pleasure to see lost footage of former basketball players hooping back in the day, and the internet seemed to find some of Michael Jordan when he was 23 years old. The Reddit video shows Jordan playing in a pickup game during the summer of 1986, and his athleticism was on full display.
During multiple times in the clip, Jordan is mostly laying the ball up or doing one-hand dunks, and the crowd is going crazy every time he makes a shot. Jordan was drafted in 1984, so this is roughly a year or two after being on the Bulls.
It's crazy to think that many people at that time probably didn't know what kind of player Jordan would come out to be, winning six championships and being regarded as one of the best players in NBA history.
Derrick Rose offers eye-opening take about Michael Jordan
Michael Jordan and Derrick Rose are highly regarded in Chicago, and Rose offered his take on Jordan's legacy in a recent appearance on the Club 520 podcast.
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“I’ve got to talk for Chicago because a lot of people, when they talk about Chicago, they always mention like the bad s***, so I’ve got to mix it up. MJ wouldn’t be MJ if he played anywhere else but Chicago for his pro career,” Rose said. “He would’ve been a great player anywhere else, but in Chicago, he became the black cat; he became MJ in Chicago.
“Just off the strength of the culture that’s in Chicago, and there’s culture everywhere. The basketball culture is just strong. The expectations of, like, alright, what are you going to do?”
Rose also thought that Jordan was able to get three more rings because of the pressure that people in Chicago put on him to win.
“I guarantee you he had people in his corner like you just went on vacation. They ain’t going to let you win three more,” Rose said. “I bet you can’t. That’s what n***** in Chi-Town were telling him. You already won one. I bet you can’t win another.”
It seemed as if Jordan got a lot of his motivation from outside noise and people talking trash, which was put on full display in The Last Dance documentary. Luckily for Jordan, he had the skill to back it up, and he had enough talent on his teams to win as many championships as he did with the Bulls.
