Was he or wasn’t he?
That seems to be the question after Sunday’s finale of ESPN’s “The Last Dance.” The ninth episode depicted that Michael Jordan’s well-documented “flu game” may have been the result of food poisoning.
Jordan revealed he ordered a pizza the night before Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals and got sick during the night. His sickness, however, lasted all day and he clearly was not his normal self for the game. (Of course, we all know how it ended.)
The revelation shocked people, considering for 23 years we believed it was the flu and not food poisoning.
Craig Fite, who says to have made the pizza at Pizza Hut that night, refutes any claim Jordan made about getting sick from his food. Fite joined 1280 The Zone’s “The Big Show” to share his side of the story.
“I remember saying this: ‘I will make the pizza, because I don’t want any of you doing anything to it,'” Fite said. “And then I told the driver, ‘You’re gonna take me there.'”
It also was said in the documentary that five people delivered the pizza to Jordan’s hotel, but Fite calls that a “crap story.”
“The crap story the guy said that there was five people, there was two of us. And I didn’t even have that many people working at the time at the store. But there was two of us,” Fite said. “I’m 100 percent certain it wasn’t food poisoning. Or, it wasn’t that pizza.”
Now it’s all become a game of he said, he said. And we’ll likely be stuck wondering for the next 23 years what the answer really is.
Of course, Jordan still put on a performance for the ages so it really didn’t matter.
