Basketball fans around the world are waiting for Michael Jordan’s highly anticipated documentary to drop.
The Last Dance, a 10-part ESPN docuseries, will highlight Jordan’s early life, emergence to NBA superstardom and his final season with the Chicago Bulls. Director Jason Hehir recently opened up to The Athletic about how Jordan felt about the docuseries.
“When people see this footage I’m not sure they’re going to be able to understand why I was so intense, why I did the things I did, why I acted the way I acted, and why I said the things I said,” Hehir recalls Jordan telling him.
“When you see the footage of [me riding with Scott Burrell], you’re going to think that I’m a horrible guy,” Hehir continued, as he revealed more about what Jordan told him. “But you have to realize that the reason why I was treating him like that is because I needed him to be tough in the playoffs and we’re facing the Indiana’s and Miami’s and New York’s in the Eastern Conference. He needed to be tough and I needed to know that I could count on him. And those are the kind of things where people see me acting the way I acted in practice, they’re not going to understand it.”
Whether people choose to love or hate Jordan after watching the documentary, it’s no denying that he is one of the greatest basketball players of all-time. He won six championships, six finals MVP awards and five MVP awards throughout his 15-season career.
“Look, winning has a price,” Jordan said in the documentary. “And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates who came after me didn’t endure all the things that I endured.”
The first two hour-long episodes of The Last Dance are set to premiere Sunday, April 19 at 9 pm ET on ESPN. Check out the trailer for the docuseries below.