We took it personally.īut when MJ suddenly convened a world-stopping retirement news conference months after striking gold with the Dream Team in Barcelona, local despair over his father’s killing was quickly forgotten. Hell, we had just seen them toweling champagne off each other inside a jubilant Bulls locker room after sealing the first three-peat. We all knew what James meant to Michael because Michael meant so much to us.

For the better part of that summer, it seemed, there was no more pressing news story in Chicagoland than the murder of James Jordan – even as fresh cases cropped up around town daily. (Bear in mind: this is a year before the OJ circus and more than three years before Bill Cosby’s only son met an eerily similar end.) It shook me: a 13-year-old Bulls-mad, Chicago native whose fierce loyalty to MJ traced to a father who had made sport of taking me trawling around the Near West Side blocks surrounding Chicago Stadium for second-hand tickets on school nights. Initially framed as a random carjacking gone horribly awry, the crime shocked the country. Jordan was believed to have been shot to death as he napped on the side of a North Carolina highway while driving home from a funeral in the small hours of 23 July. The series starts in the summer of 1993, when James Jordan went missing for three weeks before his body was discovered in a South Carolina creek. The messy details are fully reckoned with on screen at last in Moment of Truth: the Killing of James Jordan, a five-part docuseries that premieres on Amazon’s IMDb TV on Friday.

But the unabridged version of that story is nowhere near as neat or tidy. The murder of his father, James – if it even manages a passing mention in the legend – is couched as little more than an unfortunate episode in the hero’s inexorable journey to the top. T he abridged version of the Michael Jordan story goes something like this: Carolina boy misses the cut for his high school team, seals an NCAA crown for North Carolina on a late bucket and lifts the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships on the way to becoming the greatest basketball player of all time, a world-class grudge holder and an icon many times over.

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