Naturally, the focus of The Last Dance is Mike. The expected ones--Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman--get a good amount of supporting air time. But because the documentary clocks in at about 10 hours, even role players and lesser personalities in the Bulls orbit are getting decent attention. So along with B.J. Armstrong and Bill Wennington, you also get a few bites of Carmen Electra and the Sniff Brothers.
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| (via screengrab, credit WGN Radio) |
Among the Bulls bench players who shows up here and there (often to be belittled by Mike in some way) is Scott Burrell, a 3-and-D kind of player who suited up for the Bulls only that one season, but made a decent contribution in his limited playing time, averaging a touch over 5 points per game and a 2.2 Defensive Box Plus/Minus (yeah, I'm a bit of a stat geek). Some viewers have even pegged Scott as one of the key side characters in the epic Mike-Fest that is The Last Dance.
One thing Scott and Mike shared was a fondness for baseball. But while the idea of Michael Jordan as a legit Major Leaguer may be fun to speculate about, it seems a bit far fetched. Not so with Scott Burrell. Not only was Scott a legit baseball prospect, he was a baseball draft pick. In the first round. In fact, I am pretty sure he's the only person ever to be picked in the first rounds of both the NBA and MLB drafts (according to his Wikipedia entry, which cannot possibly be wrong, he was the first American athlete drafted in the first rounds of any two major sports league drafts). Scott actually pursued both sports for a while, and pitched in the Blue Jays organization during the summer while attending and playing hoops for UConn during the school year. Oh, remember Scott at UConn? I think Elden Campbell does.
So yeah, we're talking about a major athlete up there with Bo and Deion. Injuries took a bit from him in his basketball career, but in terms of natural ability, Scott truly could have excelled in about any sport. Trust me.
Why? Scott and I actually graduated high school together in 1989. I was around when scouts from all but one or two major league teams attended his first baseball game his senior year and formed a line of radar-gunners along the third base line. I saw some epic basketball battles with Bassick, Harding and Hillhouse. Plus, I actually was in gym with him one year, and saw what he could do in sports he had barely played before, like tennis. After a few games he was good enough to be a top player on our tennis team, if he had time between other sports seasons to bother. Playing volleyball with Scott was truly frightening for some of us, and I swear I am not lying when I tell you he once served the ball about 85 miles-per-hour right into the side of this poor girl Laura's face.
And football. Believe it or not, I played Pop Warner with Scott Burrell for a year, and even at that young age he was in a class by himself. A quarterback with height, a sturdy body, fast legs and a fastball-pitcher's arm, he was like a young Randall Cunningham, and had people talking about Division I football before he was in high school. That year our Junior Midget team was undefeated in the regular season (but lost to a tough team from Prospect-Naugatuck in the championship game). The next year, he moved up to Midgets, but I was still too small and stayed with the Junior Midgets. The Midgets went from about 2-6 the year before to undefeated.
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| 1983-83 Hamden Junior Midgets. Your author is the small spaced-out looking one middle row third from right. Scott is easy to pick out. |
Scott's arm was a cannon. Our Junior Midget team would play against teams that wouldn't even attempt more than a couple of passes per game, and we'd be airing it out downfield, although the running back tandem of the Barnes brothers was pretty dynamic in its own right. We won most of our games by a wide margin. Scott was also our best linebacker plus a great long snapper, which would have been nice except he was also our best punter. He just kept getting better, and was a rare freshman to make the Hamden High School varsity football team. His high school football coach described him like this in a book about UConn basketball:
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| (Peter F. Burns, Shock the World: UConn Basketball in the Calhoun Era) |
On top of this, he was a swell dude. As nice a guy as anyone on our Junior Midget squad. He stayed that way through high school. I won't lie and claim we hung out or were buds, but he was something of a celebrity even then, and his reputation was pretty spotless. He is now a beloved figure in the New Haven area and among UConn basketball fans, and a rising basketball coach leading Southern Connecticut State University. The sense you get hearing Michael Jordan talk about Scott or watching the two interact is that Michael thought Scott was TOO nice. And if you watched the doc or know anything about Mike, that will not do for Mike. He wants every teammate to be ruthless, and was willing, for better or worse, to take pretty strong measures to toughen them up (ask Will Perdue or Steve Kerr, who got punched in practice).
There is only one Michael Jordan. His Airness. MJ. Mike. He is beyond great at the game of basketball. But at the end of the day--and athletes and sports fans have a tough time realizing this sometimes--he played a ball game for a living. Sure, he was badass at said ball game, and basketball is swell, but that's all it is, a ball game. It would be silly for me to judge Michael Jordan as a person. Unlike Scott, I've never played on a team with him. But let's just say he doesn't have the warmest reputation. When all is said and done, would you rather be remembered for being great at a ball game or be beloved by your base?
Just sayin'.
If you think Scott Burrell is less of a person for not "standing up" to Michael Jordan--who, by the way, he counts as a friend and gives credit for pushing him as a teammate--here's what he had to say in a recent interview about his portrayal in The Last Dance:
And as for comments from some that Burrell should have confronted (or fought) Jordan with as much venom as he attacked him?
“There’s nothing wrong with being a good person.”
That speaks to Burrell’s enduring character, and the way he was able to hear what Jordan was saying to him, not just how he said it. To this day, the two remain fast friends.
