Michael Jordan spills on Chicago Bulls' 'travelling cocaine circus'

Basketball fans lapped up the first two episodes of the ESPN-produced Chicago Bulls documentary The Last Dance when they were released on Monday night - but one moment from Michael Jordan’s rookie season stood out more than any.

Two episodes per week of the 10-part documentary will land on Netflix over the coming months, giving viewers an unprecedented account of the Bulls’ last championship in 1998 - dubbed the ‘Last Dance’ by the coach Phil Jackson.

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While the docu-series chronicles the Bulls’ fraught final championship run that year, it also winds the clock even further back to explore Jordan’s arrival in the NBA - which included his introduction to what was, at the time, a thriving drug culture among players.

At one point Jordan is asked by an interviewer whether he’d seen an article from his rookie season, in which Chicago sports journalist Sam Smith described the Bulls’ travelling cocaine circus’.

Jordan burst out laughing, but gave more detail when pressed about the report’s accuracy.

“Look, guys were doing things I didn’t see (before),” Jordan said.

“I had one event, pre-season, I think we were in Peoria. It’s in a hotel, so I’m trying to find my teammates.

“So I start knocking on doors and I get to this one door and I knock on the door and I could hear someone say, ‘Shh, shh, shh, someone’s outside’.

“And then you hear this deep voice say, ‘Who is it?’ I say, ‘MJ’, and then they all say, ‘Ah f***, he’s just a rookie, don’t worry about it’.

“So they open up the door, I walk in and practically the whole team was in there. And it was like things I’ve never seen in my life as a young kid.

“You got your lines (of cocaine) over here, you got your weed smokers over here and you got your women over here.

“So the first thing I said was, ‘Look, man, I’m out’.

“Because all I can think about is if they come and raid this place right about now, I am just as guilty as everybody else in this room.

“And from that point on, I was more or less on my own.”

‘Former Chicago Resident’ Barack Obama

Sometimes, it’s the little things that elevate a work from good to great.

Take for example an interview with Barack Obama. The former president was a natural inclusion given his well-known fandom of Chicago sports, and it was a mark of how full this documentary is that he only got a few sentences in.

And then Twitter noticed how the producers described him.

Yeah, that’s the good stuff.

As you could imagine, people had thoughts.