Yessir, Terry Francona watched every minute of “The Last Dance” on Sunday night. Of course he did. And being the shrewd observer that he is of life’s finer details, he noticed something: His role in Michael Jordan’s path to legend-hood somehow got exactly zero air time.
But wait. Hold that outrage. We have a spoiler alert!
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“I’ve been told by a Michael Jordan confidant,” Jordan’s one and only professional baseball manager revealed, with a knowing laugh, “that I do get my 15 seconds of fame (in a pivotal episode to come) — but not one second more.”
Well, to those of us who understand what Terry Francona meant to MJ — and vice-versa — that doesn’t feel like nearly enough. So we invited the Indians manager to join me and Doug Glanville on The Athletic’s Starkville podcast this week to spin his own riveting tales of managing a very different Michael Jordan back in 1994.
This was Jordan’s first, last and only dance with professional baseball — five months with the Birmingham Barons of the Double-A Southern League, then two more months with the Scottsdale Scorpions of the Arizona Fall League. His manager in both of those stops: Mr. Terry Francona.
That may have been another lifetime ago for both of them, but it also bonded them for life. So on Sunday evening, Francona hung on every hypnotic second of “The Last Dance,” spellbound by a look inside Jordan’s other world, pursuing his second NBA three-peat with Phil Jackson’s Chicago Bulls.
“Because I got an up-close-and-personal year with Michael,” Francona said, “being able to watch some of the other stuff is really interesting to me. Watching the dynamics between him and the Bulls, and ownership, and (the) front office.”
Not to mention, Francona said, after unveiling a list of all the Netflix shows he’s been binging on (“Money Heist”!), “I’m just so desperate to watch something different that I actually was really excited that it was on.”
What the rest of the world saw, as I watched “The Last Dance,” was Jordan the G.O.A.T., owning a basketball universe where he could pretty much will anything to happen. But what his old baseball manager saw was flashes of a guy who may have hit .202 in Double A, but was still possibly the most driven, competitive human ever to pass through the Southern League at age 31.
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Asked if there were elements of Jordan that he saw on this documentary that he remembered from managing him in Birmingham, Francona replied: “Yes. And you know what it was? It was that — I don’t know if you’d call it a smirk — but it was that look he’d give you, like, as he’s walking away. He’d turn his head and give you that little half-smile, half-smirk— like, ‘You shouldn’t have bet against me.’
“And it was like, you know when he made a shot during an NBA game or something? It’s the same look. And it made me laugh like crazy.”
There were so many laughs in Francona’s appearance on this episode — as he unfurled one story after another about incurring Jordan’s wrath on the basketball court, insane 4 a.m. Yahtzee games and how he played Jordan every single day because “I valued my job” — that it sometimes felt like we should have given the manager his own Netflix comedy special.
But the serious highlights were just as riveting — those insightful reflections on what made Jordan different than almost anyone who has ever held a ball in his hands. And by that, we mean a baseball or a basketball.
Asked how he thought Jordan the baseball player was different from Jordan the hoop god, Francona summed it up like this: “You know, I think maybe the easiest way I can do this is (to say) when you put a basketball in his hand, it’s amazing how much stronger he looked. That’s probably the easiest way I can say it.
“He was really open, though,” Francona went on. “When he became a baseball player, he said, ‘I’m the worst player on the team … I know it. I’m the most inexperienced, and I have the most to learn.’ And so … he made it easy to want to help him. Again, he knew what he didn’t know. And because of that, it was easy to want to help him.
“Michael made it easy to be patient,” Francona said at another point. “And you needed to be patient with him because he hadn’t played since high school. You know how it is in rookie ball and A-ball. You learn a lot of the things and you get those mistakes out of the way. And you get to Double A, and you’re starting to become kind of a polished player. He didn’t have that.
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“But to his credit, he respected the game of baseball. That was probably the most important thing to me, was that he respected the game of baseball. And because of that, it made it really easy to be patient with him.”
Jordan was never great at baseball. He struck out nearly 30 more times than anyone on that Birmingham team. He slugged just .266. He did steal 30 bases but, in his struggles to learn how to be a base-stealer, also got thrown out 18 times.
To Terry Francona, though, those were just numbers. The manager saw beyond those numbers, and found a man who was as driven to fix his weaknesses as anyone he’d ever met — and as consumed by understanding the rhythms of baseball as anyone in his orbit.
“He just wanted to be a baseball player,” Francona said. “He loved listening to the lingo or the words we use. And I mean, he was never late. Things like that.
“I think he loved playing baseball,” Francona would say later. “And again, everybody has their opinions on why he was playing baseball. I’m one of the few who got to see it up close and personal. And I can tell you he was doing it for all the right reasons. He loved the game. And I think he wanted to give it a legit chance.
“He never got tired of practicing. It used to amaze me. You know, Mike Barnett was our hitting instructor, and he’d come in and he’d go, ‘Aw, Michael’s hands are bleeding.’ And I’d be like, ‘Well, I wonder why. The guy’s been hitting for an hour.’ His motor never stopped. And I’ve heard Phil Jackson say that. I’ve heard other people say it. It’s true. His motor never stopped.”
Maybe Jordan’s most incredible stat from that season? He tied for the team lead in games played, with 127 (out of 139 games overall). That, too, didn’t just happen randomly.
“Well, I valued my job,” Francona said, chuckling, “because you know, you’d go on the road, and owners and GMs were coming down and they’re going, ‘You’re not giving Michael a day off, are you?’ I mean, I got to learn a little diplomacy early in my career as a manager.”
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But rest assured, Francona conceded, that diplomacy wasn’t the only reason.
“He wanted to play every day,” Francona said. “He didn’t want a day off. The stories of his competitiveness are legendary, but they’re true. This guy likes to compete, and he wants to find a way to beat you one way or another — whether it’s golf, baseball, basketball, ping-pong. It doesn’t matter. He wants to beat you. And he wants to beat you into oblivion.”
Francona saw all of those traits on display on his TV screen Sunday night, just as he once saw them through his own eyeballs 26 years ago, during a summer he’ll never forget.
“The memories,” he said, “are incredible.”
And you know one of the coolest of those memories? It brought both of Jordan’s worlds together in one place, on a basketball court in Arizona. It started out casually, just “shooting around” on an off day. It soon elevated into a series of five-on-five games, with a Jordan/Francona team taking on a collection of young Fall League studs, in one game after another.
“It was Michael and the coaches against all comers,” Francona said. “You played to 11, and if you win, you stayed on the court. If you lose, you get off. Well, we had played about three or four games. And by now, I’m out of gas. My knees hurt. I mean, I’m ready to lose.”
Now here is Francona’s epic tale of how that saga ended — in a game against a team that just happened to include a young Doug Glanville:
“I threw up a long three-pointer and hit the front of the rim. Bounced off. Curtis Pride took it and slammed it home for the other team, and they won. And I was actually kind of relieved because my knees were killing me.
“And as I’m walking off the court, I hear this (crash). The ball is rattling off the window up near the ceiling. And I’m like, ‘What the heck?’ And Michael, (with) kind of that little waddle that he had, he kind of came up next to me and he goes: ‘Hey man, I always shoot last.’
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“And I didn’t say anything. I was still huffing and puffing. And he looked at me, and he goes: ‘Seriously. I always shoot last.’ And I was like, ‘Man, this game’s not televised.’ And he walked ahead of me, and he got about five steps ahead of me. And I said, ‘Michael, now you know how I feel, watching you try and hit a curveball.’
“And he took about another two steps and just hit the floor. The more you could treat him like a normal guy, the more he liked it. But he didn’t like losing. And he didn’t care who you were, what the circumstances were. He didn’t want to lose.”
For two hours Sunday night, Terry Francona was reminded of that passion all over again, through the miracle of television film-making. But once upon a time, he wasn’t just a spectator, watching in his living room. He lived it. And he’s still forever grateful that he did.
For more of Francona’s thoughts on Jordan, the return of baseball, his Netflix picks and managing an up-and-coming outfielder named Doug Glanville, check out this week’s episode of Starkville, available free wherever you find your podcasts.
(Photo of Jordan in 1994: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)
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