My whole life, I thought of Michael Jordan as a happy-go-lucky basketball genius who inspired kids and marketed shoes and McDonalds. But watching The Last Dance documentary has been fascinating for showing me how this was only a small part of his real personality.

Actually, he was a real jerk to his teammates and had to create feuds, real or imagined, with other players, his own GM, etc, to create an extreme competitive mentality. He was certainly very talented but he also worked really hard, trained very very hard, was lucky to never get injured seriously, and in a league where hundreds of other men were also training hard and were very talented, he was perhaps the MOST talented but equally importantly, he had an extreme competitive flair.

If he had simply been a friendly guy, laid back (which was his public image), he would NOT have achieved everything he did. Basketball requires a sustained fierce attitude since you need to keep up a high momentum of scoring baskets throughout the game. In contrast to hockey or baseball, where the moments of scoring are shorter, there is less need in those sports to have such an extreme Alpha attitude all the time while playing.

It's similar to running a startup where it's like "sprinting a marathon", you need to sustain your competitive fire even when there is no external stimulus forcing you to do it.

I can see Jordan's frustration somewhat with his public image being so kid-friendly - it would probably have been easier for him if his agent hadn't gotten him so many marketing tie-ins that forced him to have such a nice-guy image (like the Gatorade "be like mike" campaign). It would have been easier if his image had been closer to "bad-boy" image of Dennis Rodman, since he could have been more open and more unapologetic about his hard-charging attitude in practices and with players.

I also think it's a shame Jordan smoked (and continues to smoke) so many cigars - what a terrible habit for a professional athlete! Surely that damaged his lung capacity even during his playing days. (Jordan has up to six cigars a day, according to a Sports Illustrated report from 2017.)