One of the most contentious bits of Sunday's final episodes of “The Last Dance” was Michael Jordan's tale about the infamous “Flu Game.” Jordan himself claims that he was actually suffering from food poisoning when the Chicago Bulls faced off against the Utah Jazz during Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals.
The general belief is that Jordan ate a bad batch of pizza, with conspiracy theories pointing to the possibility of the pizza being intentionally poisoned. Recently, the individual who hand-delivered the pizza to Jordan's Utah hotel room has apparently revealed himself.
According to a man named Craig Fite, he was responsible for not only delivering the pizza, but actually making it himself. He maintains that he did nothing to the pizza outside of their normal preparation procedures:
“The guy motioned me over because he knew I was the only Bulls fan in the store,” Fite narrated in an interview on The Big Show podcast, via Wil Leitner of Fox Sports Radio. “He comes over and he goes ‘I think it’s the Bulls and it might be one of the players.’ I had been hired 3 or 4 weeks earlier as an assistant manager and I remember saying ‘I’m doing it, I will make the pizza because I don’t want anyone of you doing anything to it.’”
Fite also refuted the narrative of Jordan's personal trainer, Tim Grover, who said in Episode 9 of “The Last Dance” that there were a bunch of suspicious guys who delivered the pizza to Jordan's hotel room:
“The crap story that the guy said that there were ‘5 people’, there were 2 of us and I didn’t even have that many people working at time,” Fite claims. “I remember there being a police car parked there and you had to identify yourself. Both of us were in uniform and it’s clear where were coming from.”
Finally, Fite detailed how he meticulously prepared that pizza to the best of his ability:
“It’s tough to get food poisoning off a pizza unless of course you obviously add something to it, but that didn’t happen because it sure as heck didn’t leave my hands,” he said. “That pizza was made well, I followed all the rules, and heck, I was so busy trying to impress to become the store manager there that I followed all the rules.”
Who knows what to believe, but it's good that we were able to at least hear the pizza company's side of the story after what we saw in “The Last Dance.” Whether or not Fite is actually telling the truth, though, is an altogether different matter.
Follow Us
Subscribe