Why Michael Jordan had a cigar in only 1 of his ‘The Last Dance’ interviews

In one interview for “The Last Dance,” Michael Jordan has a cigar and drink. But not in others.

From Michael Jordan’s on-court demeanor to his life off of it — including an appetite for gambling a lot — there is an abundance of content to digest from ESPN’s The Last Dance, the 10-part documentary series about Jordan, the Chicago Bulls and their success in the 1990s.

And that includes Jordan’s sit-down interviews.

Following Sunday’s airing of the fifth and sixth episodes of The Last Dance, director Jason Hehir joined The Jalen & Jacoby Aftershow to break down what fans just saw in the docuseries. At one point, Jalen Rose and David Jacoby dove into what it was actually like for Hehir to interview Jordan about so many topics.

Hehir explained that he and his team interviewed Jordan multiple times for The Last Dance, three of which have appeared in the doc so far. The first time was in June of 2018, and Hehir said he didn’t speak with Jordan again until May of 2019 — when he set out with an even more specific plan for what he called a “surgical” interview to fill in some major holes in the production at that point.

Well, as it turns out, Jordan went into it with a slightly different pre-interview plan too, thanks to his mom, Deloris Jordan. According to Hehir, the reason Jordan has a drink and cigar next to him in their first interview (when he’s wearing the dark blue shirt) and not in the subsequent ones is because Deloris didn’t care for it.

Hehir said:

“He couldn’t have a cigar on set because his mom got mad at him. And he said, ‘I can’t have the cigars today because my mom got mad at me because she saw me smoking a cigar.'”

Gotta listen to your mom, even when you’re the GOAT, even if you’re seen throughout the doc smoking multiple cigars and even if you smoke six cigars a day.

That then opened the door for Rose to then bring up Jordan’s drink in that interview and the varying levels of it. When Rose asked how Jordan’s glass appeared to get refilled throughout that interview, Hehir said:

“I don’t know because that was our first interview with him and, quite frankly, I was [expletive] myself about interviewing Michael Jordan for the first time for a 10-hour documentary. And I could care less — he could have plutonium in that glass and it would be fine with me.

“The other thing that’s misleading is that, all right, you can look at the levels of that glass, [but] also look at the lighting in the background. So sometimes the glass is low, and it’s dark out. Sometimes it’s high with full ice cubes, and it’s broad daylight. We interviewed him around five or six at night, so it went from day to night. That first interview took three hours. He didn’t get out of that chair until 8:30, 9 o’clock.

“So he may be talking about how intense he is in practice at 5:45. He may have another thought about that at 8:15, and we may edit those two thoughts together in the edit room. So when you see one shot and his glass is up here [gestures], it doesn’t mean that while we went to a B-roll he chugged the thing and took a triple shot.”

That’s basic editing. And whether it’s because MJ’s mom doesn’t like him smoking or, presumably, drinking mid-interview or for the sake of continuity, perhaps it’s best he’s not doing either in the later interviews. Although, it is a pretty classic look for him as viewers learn more about his competitive and petty nature.

You can catch more of Hehir’s interview on The Jalen & Jacoby Aftershow here:

[jwplayer LyTv3QMP-q2aasYxh]

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