In North Carolina, where tailgating drivers are nicknamed Richard Petty wannabes, only one person is bigger than a NASCAR daredevil. His name is Michael Jordan, who exploited basketball and sport like no other athlete of his time and now believes he’ll dismantle the racing albatross by showing up in a courthouse.
Why would he care enough as an owner, who has won nine races in four years, to file a monumental antitrust lawsuit? Doesn’t he have more gambling pranks to lose against Rory McElroy and Justin Thomas at his Florida golf course? Wouldn’t Mike Tirico need more time for Jordan’s “Insights to Excellence” TV segments? Um, sorry. Anyone who views the legal proceedings as frivolous does not understand what he has accomplished — and what he is pursuing in a world he continues to control at 62.
He is the man who confronted the Jerrys, Reinsdorf and Krause, to win six NBA titles in Chicago. He is the man who made $2 billion in marketing his Air Jordan shoe brand. He is the first sportsman to rank on the list of richest Americans, even when he has lost millions to creeps. Whatever he wants to do, he keeps grabbing the ball and continues to soar. This month, in uptown Charlotte, Jordan is voicing disgust about a true Southern entity that strangles teams and rejects a genuine business partnership.
Know anyone else who grasps the growth of an enterprise beyond Jordan, who led the NBA from a tape-delay league to a $77 billion behemoth? In his mind, NASCAR is stiflingly old-school as run by a chairman, Jim France, who might remind him of Krause. He wants command and hopes to remove the charter system from the industry. Already, federal judge Kenneth D. Bell has warned both sides that a sport might crumble when a jury announces a decision this week. “Everybody is going to get hurt,” he said, pointing out that NASCAR has a monopoly on paper.
Think Jordan cares? He once tried to scrape Reggie Miller’s eyeballs. He went on “The Last Dance” and referred to Reinsdorf as a liar. Maybe his ego is bruised after losing as an owner in Charlotte and Washington, but he senses it’s time to win a conflict that attracts a nation’s attention. In his home state, his photo adorns restaurants and bars that freshly remember his corner jumper from 1982, when he won a championship for the Tar Heels. The people enjoy NASCAR.
They love Jordan more.
“My name is Michael Jeffrey Jordan, and I grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina,” he said Friday, reminding the jury and a packed audience that he his parents took him to local tracks. His attorney, Jeffrey Kessler, was smart enough to help athletes win NIL money to play college sports. He also let Jordan speak just before the weekend.
“Someone had to step forward and challenge the entity,” Jordan said. “I sat in those meetings with longtime owners who were brow-beaten for so many years trying to make change. I was a new person, I wasn’t afraid. I felt I could challenge NASCAR as a whole. I felt as far as the sport, it needed to be looked at from a different view.
“The thing I’m hoping for is you create more of a partnership between two entities. If that’s the case, it becomes a more valuable business. If you can ever compromise on the things that matter, you can grow your business.”
Hailed by his team as a first-class owner — not what Scottie Pippen said in the 2020 documentary, of course — Jordan wants to take down France. An economist said Monday that NASCAR owes more than $350 million to the plaintiffs, including $215.8 million to 23XI Racing. That’s another big check to cash. “I’m not discrediting the things NASCAR has done for the sport, but I’m pushing them to be better. The risk is to the drivers and the teams,” Jordan said. “The credit is not being given to the drivers who risk their lives every week without an insurance policy or union. There is nothing to benefit them. I never saw Jim France drive a car. I never saw Jim France risk his life.
“I’d like to give a little more credit to those who do.”
France is expected to testify this week. NASCAR president Steve O’Donnell has painted Jordan’s crew as demonstrative, detailing meetings with longtime business partner Curtis Polk as “the most difficult meetings I’ve had with an individual in my 30 years in NASCAR.” He said, “Mr. Polk stuck to his messages. He did not have an appreciation for the sport. He was a businessman who said he could leave anytime. He threatened to kick me out of my own meeting. I knew he wasn’t coming from a place of respect.”
Will France have the crankshaft to rip apart Jordan? He might after Heather Gibbs, co-owner of Joe Gibbs Racing, described how her father pleaded with France after Gibbs’ husband died in 2022. She wanted a permanent charter for her team. France said no, which prompted Joe Gibbs — who won three Super Bowls in Washington — to beg mercy. “The document was something in business you would never sign,” Heather said. “It was like a gun to your head: If you don’t sign, you have nothing.”
Jordan has remained cool. When a fan blasted the Alan Parsons song, played before 1990s Bulls games, he calmly walked by outside the courthouse. He was asked on the stand about his career. “I’ve heard you were pretty good at basketball?” an attorney asked.
“I used to be,” Jordan said.
“Did you play for any other teams?”
“I try to forget, but I did,” said Jordan, omitting the Wizards.
The audience loved his stories. “My father used to pack the whole family in. We’d go to Darlington, we’d go to Rockingham, we’d go to Charlotte, we came down to Daytona and Talladega,” he said. “And we would just go, and we’d spend the whole day. And from that point on, I’ve been hooked on NASCAR.”
This is a rare occasion when Jordan gives us a tour of his childhood. It’s hard to believe, in the second week, that any forward-thinker would favor Jim France.
Envision MJ as the new king of NASCAR. Never doubt him.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.