Michael Jordan meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But few had a closer view of the legend than Scottie Pippen.
The two players won six NBA championships while playing together and their time as teammates was put under a massive spotlight when ESPN aired The Last Dance documentary in 2020. Pippen, like millions of others, watched each week.
While it was assuredly fascinating for him to take a trip down memory lane, Pippen has said it was challenging for him to see Jordan constantly glorified while he and his teammates were not given “nearly enough praise” for their contributions to the six title runs.
"They glorified Michael Jordan while not giving nearly enough praise to me and my proud teammates." @ScottiePippen on #TheLastDance https://t.co/siqcfaGmTP
— GQ Magazine (@GQMagazine) November 2, 2021
According to Pippen, whose upcoming memoir Unguarded will release on Nov. 9, the last two episodes of the ten-episode series were particularly tough pills to swallow.
In an excerpt from the book that was published on Tuesday morning, here is part of what the seven-time All-Star said about Jordan (via GQ):
“Even in the second episode, which focused for a while on my difficult upbringing and unlikely path to the NBA, the narrative returned to MJ and his determination to win. I was nothing more than a prop. His ‘best teammate of all time,’ he called me. He couldn’t have been more condescending if he tried.”
Pippen reiterated that each episode showed Jordan on a “pedestal” while his other teammates were just tertiary characters in his journey.
While he said he wasn’t surprised at this depiction and he felt it would have been “naive” to expect anything different, being “demeaned” once again was brutal because it was “insulting enough” when it happened in real-time.
Scottie Pippen being mad that Michael Jordan made Michael Jordan look good in a Michael Jordan documentary is incredible. 😂
— Michael Sykes, II (@MikeDSykes) November 2, 2021
Beyond the journalistic integrity that vanished when the producers gave Jordan editorial control of the final product, Pippen also felt fiscally slighted as well:
“To make things worse, Michael received $10 million for his role in the doc while my teammates and I didn’t earn a dime, another reminder of the pecking order from the old days. For an entire season, we allowed cameras into the sanctity of our locker rooms, our practices, our hotels, our huddles…our lives.”
Later in the excerpt, Pippen also shared some not-so-positive thoughts he had about former teammate and longtime Bulls executive John Paxson.
Pippen also expressed dismay about his role as an ambassador for Chicago’s organization, which he held from 2012 until 2020. While he was seemingly given more responsibility in 2014, unfortunately for Pippen, that wasn’t the case either:
“I was excited to be involved with the basketball operations. For the Bulls to benefit from my expertise instead of exploiting my name. After filing the scouting reports, I waited to hear back from Paxson and other members of the organization. What would they want me to do next? I didn’t hear a word. Nor did the Bulls invite me to any meetings or workouts with prospects in the weeks leading up to the 2014 NBA draft. It dawned on me they’d been humoring me from the start.”
All things considered, his excerpt made it obvious there will be a lot more packed in that will assuredly draw all sorts of eyeball emojis on Twitter.
[mm-video type=playlist id=01f09kz5ecxq9bp57b player_id=01f1jz39sevw828w2p image=https://ftw.usatoday.com/wp-content/plugins/mm-video/images/playlist-icon.png]
[lawrence-related id=968596]
[listicle id=1044349]