Michael Jordan is one of the greatest athletes we’ve ever seen pick up a ball of any kind. But we all knew that.
That’s not what makes MJ a legend, though. It’s the mythology that does all that. Some of the stories are real, some of them aren’t. But there are so many that you’re just eventually left like…”they can’t ALL be fake, right?”
That’s where this latest story from North Carolina Head Coach Roy Williams falls. On The Herd on Monday, Williams claimed Jordan ran a 4.38 40-yard dash once during a team practice when Williams was an assistant coach under Dean Smith in 1982.
Williams said three coaches were tracking Jordan’s time with stopwatches. One got 4.39 and two got 4.38. He tells the rest in the 5:00 mark of the video.
“So I waited, I said ‘Michael, we missed your start. We made a mistake here. I need you to run it again.’ He said ‘Oh, too fast for you, huh?’ He goes back to the line, runs it again, and all of us got below 4.4 as a sophomore.”
Fam. Roy Williams is trying to tell us Jordan would’ve been faster than all but four of the athletes at the NFL combine this year. Think about that. It’s almost like the only thing he wasn’t good at was baseball. Oh, and running the Wizards. But that doesn’t count. No one has ever been good at that.
Now, there’s a big caveat here. They tracked Jordan with stopwatches and there’s a huge margin of error with those. That has to be accounted for here.
But, honestly, it is not surprising to hear this at all. Larry Bird didn’t call this man God for nothing. The legend of Jordan just keeps growing.