Will Perdue knew Episodes 7 and 8 of “The Last Dance’’ would be tear jerkers.
Not necessarily for all the viewers of the wildly-popular ESPN documentary, but for all the players that knew how important James Jordan was to his son, and Bulls legend, Michael Jordan, as well as how much he meant to that entire three-peat championship roster.
“[Jordan’s] dad loved to talk basketball,’’ Perdue said to the Sun-Times recently, when discussing “The Last Dance.’’ “His dad would approach all of us. ‘Hey Will, how you doing, man? It’s pretty cool that I got to meet your parents over Christmas, I love talking to your mom because she grew up in Virginia on a farm …’ His memory was unbelievable.
“I used to have conversations with him all the time, and he would be around the practice facility, he would be on the road, he was just like the All-American dad. I don’t know what kind of relationship he and Michael had behind closed doors, it looked great, but he was an ‘Aw shucks, guy.’ People would be like, ‘That’s Michael’s dad?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Damn, he’s just like a regular guy that just loves talking to you.’ ‘’
Episodes 7 and 8 dove into the relationship Jordan had with his father, and also the tragedy that hit the entire family when James was murdered in 1993.
A few months after James was killed, his son shocked the world and retired from the NBA … for the first time.
Perdue said he knew that Michael and his father often talked baseball and the love they both had for the game, and even with all the rumors that he would be putting away the Air Jordan’s for some cleats, the big man still didn’t believe Jordan would walk away from the NBA.
“I was shocked,’’ Perdue recalled of that October 1993 press conference at the Berto Center. “There were rumors of it, but c’mon, really? After what happened to his father, the best place to be was on the basketball floor. Where else would his father want him to be? That’s what I was thinking, or maybe hoping.
“People don’t realize that guys on the team had a better relationship with his father than we did with him. I’m not saying we didn’t have relationships with Michael, but Michael was really guarded in how he did things.’’
Meanwhile, while Jordan was living out his “Field of Dreams’’ with the White Sox, Perdue and the new-look Bulls went onto win 55 games without the greatest player on the planet, and more importantly, play a style of basketball that actually allowed them to like each other again.
“Without MJ that team was a lot more harmonious because we really had to come together to win 55 games,’’ Perdue said. “There wasn’t as much drama, wasn’t as much tension, because there wasn’t much expected of us. But there was that, ‘OK, we’ll show you.’ We probably got along more on that team than the first three championship teams combined.’’
But don’t mistake Perdue’s honesty for a dislike of Jordan or all that was accomplished in that first three-peat. Quite the opposite.
“I can honestly say that there were many times where everyone on that first run wasn’t on the same page,’’ Perdue said. “I mean this with total respect, because we had to find ways to get everybody on the same page. We had to find ways to play together, whether you like the guy or not, and we did it. That is an unbelievable accomplishment.’’
