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Last Sunday's episodes of “The Last Dance” talked about Michael Jordan's gambling “problems.” One of the most memorable scenes was when a fed up Jordan did an impromptu interview with then-NBC reporter and good buddy Ahmad Rashad to finally address all the accusations the media had placed on him pertaining to what was perceived to be a gambling problem.
Recently, Rashad did an interview with Mark Medina of USA TODAY, and the sportscaster shared how that infamous interview came to be.
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“He calls me on the way to arena and says, ‘Go get a cameraman. Let’s do this interview and get over with it,” Rashad recalls. “There’s something I want to say.’ I realized because he hadn’t been talking to a lot of people that there was going to be some jealous people that would take a shot at me because I was interviewing him. So rather than me just go and do the interview, I talked to (former NBC chairman) Dick Ebersol and told him, ‘This is what I have. What I need you to do is write all the questions.’ I don’t want anybody saying this was on me and I didn’t ask the right question. You write all the questions and I’ll ask those questions.’
“He wrote the questions. Then we went out and we did it. Once we finished, I stopped the interview and said, ‘Listen, is there anything else that we missed?’ Do we need to go further with this? (Jordan is) sitting here right now and we can ask him whatever we want to. Tell me what else we need to do.’ Everybody said, ‘Nope, this is okay and this is fine.’ That’s what happened.”
That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Rashad. In hindsight, it does appear that he was able to handle the interview as well as he could have. Any other person in the media would have loved to be in his shoes at that point in time, and it is clear that Rashad cherishes that moment to this very day.
