Follow the Truth: Journey through grief, the death of Michael Jordan's dad
I have a confession to make: I am not a sports fan. To be brutally honest, I am the opposite of a sports fan. I have spent my entire life doing other things while people I knew watched sports. When I was growing up, I would bring a book with me to read when my dad took me to NFL games in my hometown of Philadelphia.
I know this akin to blasphemy to most people who love sports. I get it. Okay, I don’t really get it. But I respect other people’s passion for sports because it is no different than my passion for things like reading and writing. I have been to many games over the years in a social context, but never as an actual fan who understood or cared very much about what I was watching.
This is all a long way of saying I knew almost nothing about Michael Jordan before I started covering this case. Sure, I knew he went to UNC-Chapel Hill. I knew he was a famous and very successful basketball player who endorsed a lot of products, but that was it. And even though I’ve been aware of this case as a journalist for more than a decade, I only recently researched his career and the history of his family for this true crime podcast.
What I learned was not that surprising – that Michael Jordan loved his dad, James, and his dad loved him. I learned that James Jordan was beyond proud, that he beamed about his son on and off the basketball court. Who wouldn’t? And I learned that the Jordans were a complicated family, their secrets and dysfunctions purposely hidden from the world in order to make sure Michael’s stardom wasn’t tainted.
I guess the thing that was the hardest for me to understand was the fact that while the world grieved for Michael Jordan and his family, Michael himself never shared very much of his grief with the world. He did talk about it once – on the Oprah Winfrey Show – but that was it. And even in that appearance, his statements were vague and brief.
As someone who lost a parent in 2012, the catharsis that comes along with sharing your grief with a wide audience is unexplainable. In my opinion, it is a painful, but helpful part of the grief journey. Because I am a local television reporter, viewers knew that my mother was dying, and they reached out to me. To this day, I still recall many of their kind words of support and condolences. Some people even shared their personal stories of grief over losing a parent with me. Looking back, I know that talking about my grief, even with strangers, helped me to heal.
So, Michael Jordan’s private grief in the face of such a public death is something that has left a lot of people wanting for more, wanting to know how it impacted him, changed him, broke him. Why? Because we all want to overcome tragedy, and we look to high-profile people to see how they navigate the same path. And it’s his right, as it is anyone’s right, to remain tight-lipped on this issue, to guard his privacy. But because he never made himself vulnerable to this kind of scrutiny, we are left to speculate, left to wonder how losing a parent dims a shining star.
And so, for me, at its core, this case is not about sports at all. It’s about a man who lost his father when he was on top of the world. And even from that highest peak, grief has the power to bring you to your knees.
Click to listen to Episode 3 of Follow The Truth. You may also subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app.
