As per Sam Smith’s 1991 book The Jordan Rules, Michael Jordan participated in the three-point shooting contest in 1990. However, despite the increase in his three-point shooting abilities, MJ achieved an all-time low score of five points during the competition. Sam Smith suggested that Jordan was quite fed up with various frustrating aspects of the league and expressed his desire to leave the NBA to his teammates.
He’d gone through a dance like this with the league in 1989. Jordan didn’t want to compete in the contest, so he told Thorn when he called—as a way to get him to stop bothering him—to raise the prize money to $20,000; it had been $12,500. Thorn called back a few days later and said, “Done.” Jordan was stunned. “I’ll think about it,” he said. Besides the possibility of a fall from his dunking throne, Jordan had always found himself weary after the All-Star weekend, and had not played well in the succeeding games. It was time to let some kids come out of the bullpen and have a start, Jordan felt. But the league announced that Jordan had agreed to participate. Jordan called the Bulls; he needed the team to say he was injured so he couldn’t compete. No problem. Within a few days of the All-Star game, Jordan turned up with a minor injury and the Bulls said they didn’t want to risk Jordan exacerbating the problem. The league compromised in 1990. Would Jordan come to the three-point-shooting contest? Sure, he’d try. He thought that might be fun, and certainly less pressure. He would find out differently. Jordan had been shooting more threes that season and hitting them, but he was nervous for the contest and posted an all-time low score of five points. He’d had it with All-Star-weekend contests. In many ways, Jordan had had it with basketball. “Five more years,” he eagerly told teammates early in January. “Five more years and I’m out of here. I’m marking these days on a calendar, like I’m in jail. I’m tired of being used by this organization, by the league, by the writers, by everyone.”
Other fun excerpts from the book:
"I hate being out there with those garbagemen. They don't get you the ball."
"They've got no idea what it's all about. The white guys [John Paxson and Ed Nealy], they work hard, but they don't have the talent. And the rest of them? Who knows what to expect? They're not good for much of anything."
"“Big, fat, fat guy,” Jordan went on. “One rebound in three games. Power forward. Maybe they should call it powerless forward.” - MJ on Stacey King
Jordan could be razor-sharp of tongue with an implicit, cutting message, like when he saw struggling rookie Stacey King walking into the locker room carrying a box: “I hope there’s a jump shot in there,” Jordan cracked. Or when then-reserve Charles Davis was sorting through tickets for friends and family when the team was playing a game in Atlanta: “They don’t need a ticket to watch you sitting on the bench. They can go to your house for that.”
“Screw you, M.J.,” Grant shot back. “All you care about is your points and everyone knows it. You don’t care about anything but yourself.” “You’re an idiot,” Jordan screamed at Grant. “You’ve screwed up every play we ever ran. You’re too stupid to even remember the plays. We ought to get rid of you.”
So he told Grant, Vincent, and Pippen—three players who were usually on the floor at the end of games with him—that they were not to pass Cartwright the ball in the last four minutes of a game. “If you do that,” Jordan said, “you’ll never get the ball from me."
It was a quiet trip home, filled with glassy eyes and glum looks. Jordan unfurled the stat sheet on the bus and offered: “Headache tonight, Scottie?”
Before the season, the Bulls traded Sanders to Miami, which later released him. He went to the CBA and got called up on a ten-day contract by the Charlotte Hornets; “It’s probably a twelve-day,” Jordan said when he heard about it. “He needs two days to wake up"
“They’re not interested in winning,” he would say. “They just want to sell tickets, which they can do because of me. They won’t make any deals to make us better. And this [Toni] Kukoc thing. I hate that. They’re spending all their time chasing this guy.” Jordan felt the media were demanding too much of his time and sniping at him. He felt his teammates were becoming too heavy a load to carry. And now he had two children at home. It all was becoming just too much. All he wanted to do was play golf.
Stopped by a reporter and asked about the Davis deal, Jordan took off after Krause again. “If I were general manager,” he said, “we’d be a better team.”
Jordan’s dislike for Perdue was palpable. He called him “Will Vanderbilt.” “He doesn’t deserve to be named after a Big Ten school,” Jordan would explain. Jordan rarely talked to the big center, whom general manager Jerry Krause had projected as the team’s pivot player of the 1990s.
But now, in 1990, Jackson was in charge. Jordan was dubious, but he liked Jackson and had come to respect his knowledge of the game and the way he handled the team. “He’s the coach,” Jordan would say after meeting with Jackson. “I’ll follow his scheme, but I don’t plan to change my style of play. I’m sure everything will be fine if we win, but if we start losing, I’m shooting.”
Link to book: https://www.amazon.com/Jordan-Rules-Sam-Smith/dp/0671796666
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