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  • do you have one moment you can point to as the most surprising moment you want way.

  • I can't believe he just said that or that was just revealed.

  • What was the most surprising thing for you in this process?

  • Well, specifically, I'd say the most enlightening moment came early in Michael's first interview, and you saw it in the first episode.

  • It was only 15 or 20 minutes into his first interview when I was asking him about, um, I told him that one rider had referred to those early Bulls teams as the Chicago Bulls traveling cocaine circus.

  • The laughter that that elicited.

  • I had never heard that laugh out of Michael in all the tape that I've watched in all the documentaries I've seen about him, even the limited time that spent with him before that I'd never heard him laugh like that before.

  • And he very easily could have bobbed and weaved through that question and said, Yeah, well, that was a crazy time and not offered anything else.

  • The mere fact that he laughed like that acknowledged that it was true.

  • And then for him to turn around and calm down from laughing and offer us that anecdote that he gave us about his experience as a kid coming from Dean Smith's program, a Chapel Hill on seeing those things he saw in that hotel room in Peoria.

  • That's gold, no matter who you're talking to.

  • But to get it out of your main character in a 10 hour documentary and for that main character to P one of the most significant figures and 12 culture of my lifetime.

  • Um, that was that was the moment that everything clicked.

  • And I thought, You know what this might be Maura about, uh, Michael Jordan, the person, even the Michael Jordan, the basketball player taking Michael Jordan out of your options.

  • Who was the, um, most fun for you to interview in this entire process?

  • Those fun?

  • Um, Horace Grant was a lot of fun.

  • We horse lives up the coast in in L in California.

  • We have done a ton of interviews in L.

  • A.

  • And a lot of these things, a grueling is because budgetarily we have to get through three or four them per day.

  • But we couldn't do that with horror because it took so long for us to drive up there.

  • We drove up.

  • It was a gorgeous day.

  • And with my producer, Jake Role Gal, who's been at my side for all 106 of these interviews, these booked all of them himself.

  • So it was We thought at that point is gonna be one of our final interviews.

  • Certainly the final West Coast stuff.

  • Um, and horse Horace got there before we did.

  • He was already he had a couple of friends ahead and he knew all the guys in that in that part of town, and he was kind of reminiscing with them and he came in a great mood and I don't know what I expected out of him, but I certainly didn't expect this gregarious storyteller that we got in Horace.

  • Interviewing Steve Kerr was tremendous.

  • He's just such a thoughtful, incisive, intelligent guy.

  • He was in between games in New York.

  • They were playing the Nets and the Knicks on a Friday and Sunday.

  • So on Saturday afternoon he had an off day and we interviewed him at his hotel.

  • That was memorable.

  • Steve curves, Mom, you'll see an episode nine.

  • The moms in this specifically you know, uh, Delores Jordan and anchor were so impressive.

  • Um, and the stories that they told and the candor that they told him with, um were so impressive to me.

  • So Phil Jackson, we show up the full Jackson's house, and I don't even think he knew we were coming that day.

  • And it's a very, very out of the way place.

  • So it's not the kind of place you say, all right, we'll come back next week like we had to do it that day.

  • We had a whole camera crew we had flown in and all that, and somehow the word did not get to him properly.

  • That we were showing up that day and filling that ended up giving us 5.5 hours in his backyard.

  • So sitting in this gorgeous backyard in the middle of Montana, which is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been talking to Phil Jackson about the history of the MBA, his history in the N B A, those old next teams and then his path from the C B A to the those Puerto Rican leagues that he talked about all the way through his Bulls tenure.

  • I mean, there's so many fascinating interviews here um I grew up as a Celtics fan in the eighties as a kid.

  • So Bird was, you know, God and Bird and Magic were, you know, God and I want to see the Devil for magic, but it's his rival.

  • I grew up pretending I was playing against Magic Johnson in my backyard.

  • So to be sitting there, talking to him and asking him about these things that I experienced as a kid, it was It was a thrill.

  • I'm really, really lucky when you have 10 hours to tell a story.

  • Um, I think a lot of people would be shocked by this, but I'm 100% sure it's true.

  • So I feel comfortable asking you.

  • There's something you left out that you really wish you couldn't.

  • You didn't have to.

  • There's some story.

  • You have a favorite story that didn't make they got left on the cutting room floor.

  • I know you do.

  • What is You know who was gold?

  • Was Roy Williams.

  • When you asked who is the most fun to interview he may have been.

  • He's right up there because he's like, right out of central casting with that Southern accent and that kind of like this avuncular old college coach.

  • He was the guy who recruited Michael at UNC, so he knew the Jordan family really well.

  • He knew the parents really well.

  • In the course of Michael's recruitment to U.

  • N.

  • C um, Michael's dad build him a wood burning stove with bare hands.

  • Michael, Dad put put the second story of their house.

  • Hey, built the second story of their one level house with his bare hands himself ripped the roof off, and there was a tarp over.

  • Michael's room was freezing cold and rain hitting the tarp as James Jordan is taking weeks, if not months, to build the second story of their house and Wilmington, North Carolina.

  • So Roy Roy told the story of how Mr Jordan shows up with this wood stove on a truck.

  • I don't know where rings his doorbell, and it is in the process of Michael being recruited.

  • It's one thing for a coach to be giving you something.

  • But for the regrouped to be giving the coach something that's just how generous the guy James Waas and how much he appreciated how kind Roy Williams, Waas and Roy was.

  • Ah, part time coach At that point, I think he was earning, like, $8000 a year to coach at UNC.

  • So James Jordan shows up and he's got this huge wood stove on his truck and he said, I need your help to get it inside your house and Roy said, I can't accept that.

  • I'm sure this violates some sort of rule and Mr Jordan said, Listen, it took me a lot of time to build this thing.

  • It took me a lot of time to get it on the truck and drive it all the way out to your house.

  • I'm gonna be really upset if you make me drive back to my house with this stove that I built for you.

  • The next thing you know they're installing in the House and Roy Williams years later, he's selling his house and one of the potential buyers is coming through and says, That's a beautiful stove.

  • Is that a Fisher?

  • No, that's Jordan.

do you have one moment you can point to as the most surprising moment you want way.

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