Michael Jordan once poured in a bunch of points on the Cavaliers hours after guzzling “maybe 10 Bud Lights” on the golf course alongside Jeremy Roenick, the former Chicago Blackhawks superstar revealed this week on the “McNeil & Parkins Show.”
“‘Meet me at [Chicago’s] Sunset Ridge, early. We’re gonna go play 18 holes’” Roenick said the golf-loving Jordan told him at the end of either the 1992 or 1993 season. “We played a round, I beat him for a couple thousand [dollars] and got ready to leave … Now, the Bulls are playing that night. They played Cleveland that night. I’m thinking he’s leaving, it’s 10 o’clock. He goes, ‘No, let’s go play again.’
“So we go and fill up a bag full of ice and Coors Light and walk again. We roll around another 18 and I take him for another couple [thousand dollars]. Now we’ve been drinking all afternoon and he’s going from Sunset Ridge to the stadium, to play a game. I’m messing around. I’m like, ‘I’m gonna call my bookie. All the money you just lost to me, I’m putting on Cleveland.’
“He goes, ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll bet you that we’ll win by 20 points and I have more than 40 [points].’ I’m like, ‘Done.’ Son of a gun goes out and scores 52 and they win by 26 points or something.”
Though there wasn’t a Bulls-Cavs game from either of those two seasons that met those points criteria, Jordan did put up 44 points in a 24-point win over Cleveland in March 1992.
“He had maybe 10 Bud Lights,” said Roenick, the 49-year-old NHL analyst on NBC. “The man, Michael Jordan to me, is probably the best athlete that I’ve ever seen.”
Jordan, the 56-year-old principal owner of the Hornets, is well-known for gambling on the greens. Fellow NBA star Charles Barkley said he once had to move out of the way so Jordan could take a putt for $300,000.
“It was crazy, man. But I never understood why they were playing for that much,” Barkley said in 2017.