Michael Jordan, twenty-three years off the court and still building things that have to win

Michael Jordan is sixty-three years old, has not played a competitive basketball game in more than twenty years, and spent a recent television interview confessing that the urge to play again is, in his own phrasing, “not a teeny piece, it’s a huge piece”. He said it to Gayle King with the half-smile of a man who knows the answer is closed. Then he changed the subject to NASCAR. The interview was meant to be an “Insights to Greatness” piece for NBC’s NBA return; it ended up reading like a status report on a competitor who has rerouted the hunger, not abolished it.

This is the unresolved fact at the centre of the late chapter. The canonised Jordan — six rings, six Finals MVP trophies, ten scoring titles, the closing-seconds jumper against Utah that ended the 1998 Finals — is sealed. The working Jordan is not. He owns the racing team currently leading the NASCAR Cup standings, he draws what is widely reported as the highest broadcaster contract in network sports for a few hours of pre-recorded camera time per year, and the sneaker line that carries his name shipped 7.3 billion dollars in fiscal 2025 even after a sixteen-percent decline. The trophy case stopped filling in 2003. The competition didn’t.

He was born in Brooklyn and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, the fourth of five children of a General Electric supervisor named James and a bank teller named Deloris who ran a household around discipline and second chances. The boy did not make the varsity basketball team as a tenth-grader at Laney High — the more careful version of the story is that he was placed on junior varsity because the varsity returned fourteen of its fifteen players, but the slight cut deep enough that he kept referring back to it for thirty years. He grew four inches the summer after, walked into Dean Smith’s programme at North Carolina in 1981, and hit the championship-winning jumper against Georgetown in the 1982 Final as a freshman. The first myth was set before he was twenty.

The Chicago Bulls drafted him third in 1984, behind Hakeem Olajuwon and Sam Bowie. Within twelve months he was Rookie of the Year, within four he was the league’s Most Valuable Player and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season, and within seven the Bulls began the first three-peat — 1991, 1992, 1993 — against Magic Johnson’s Lakers, Clyde Drexler’s Trail Blazers and Charles Barkley’s Suns. Then, in the summer of 1993, his father James was murdered on a North Carolina roadside, and Jordan walked away from the sport to play minor-league baseball for the Birmingham Barons of the Chicago White Sox organisation. The faxed two-word return — “I’m back” — landed in March 1995. The second three-peat — 1996, 1997, 1998 — followed against Seattle and Utah twice, the Utah series closing on the jumper over Bryon Russell that has since become the photograph that sells the brand.

The critical paragraph has to live here, because the canon has a counter-canon. The Last Dance, the ten-episode ESPN and Netflix documentary that Jason Hehir cut from five hundred hours of 1997-98 access footage and released into the empty pandemic spring of 2020, gave Jordan the editorial vote on the final cut. What the series argues is unambiguous: the competitiveness that made the six rings possible also made him difficult to be on a team with. Horace Grant, Will Perdue and Steve Kerr (whom Jordan punched in a 1995 practice) all sit inside the film’s frame. Jordan’s own line — “winning has a price, and leadership has a price” — was the show’s self-defence and its admission at the same time. Then there is the Washington Wizards comeback of 2001-2003, which the documentary mostly skips: the chapter where the executive who had drafted Kwame Brown the year before put himself back in uniform at thirty-eight, averaged a respectable twenty points and shot below forty-five percent for the only time in his career. The arc is six rings and then a coda nobody asks to be remembered for.

The post-playing decades have made him a different kind of public figure. The Hornets — bought in 2010 for two hundred and seventy-five million dollars and sold in August 2023 for three billion to a group led by Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall — never advanced past the first round of the playoffs on his watch, a thirteen-year record that sits awkwardly next to the eleven-figure exit. He kept a minority stake. The Jordan Brand inside Nike, where he draws an estimated five-percent royalty, paid him two hundred and seventy-five million dollars in 2025 alone and lifted Sportico’s inflation-adjusted career-earnings ranking to four and a half billion dollars, the highest the magazine has ever calculated for any athlete in any sport. He is, by Forbes’s count, worth four point three billion. He is also, more privately, the husband since April 2013 of the Cuban-American model Yvette Prieto, the father of twin daughters Victoria and Ysabel born in February 2014, and the father of three adult children — Jeffrey, Marcus, Jasmine — from his first marriage to Juanita Vanoy.

The thing that visibly engages him now is the racing team. He co-founded 23XI Racing with the Cup driver Denny Hamlin in 2020 — the team name is his old number stitched to Hamlin’s — and Tyler Reddick opened the 2026 season by winning the Daytona 500, then Atlanta, then COTA, the first driver in modern Cup history to take the first three races of a season. Reddick followed with Darlington and Kansas, becoming the first driver since Dale Earnhardt in 1987 to win five of the first nine. Bubba Wallace runs the second car. The team currently leads the Cup standings; Jordan, in interview after interview, talks about it the way he used to talk about Game 7. NBC’s “NBA on NBC” package launched its return for the 2025-26 season with him as a special contributor, the Insights to Greatness slot, a few pre-recorded sit-downs spread across the year. The Reddick streak, the Vatican-less Pope-Francis ad, the Sportico ranking, the Gayle King interview — these are the closing weeks of the bio, and they are all about a man who keeps producing the thing he wants to produce. The next race is at Talladega. The next ring won’t be at the United Center.