Each year brings with it a host of new books written about sports, from journalists’ explorations of teams and players to memoirs by athletes and coaches revisiting their glory days. Much rarer are the books that offer a truly candid look inside a sport. Sometimes these are memoirs, as was the case with Jim Bouton’s landmark Ball Four. And sometimes they come from journalists with extraordinary levels of access.
Such was the case with Sam Smith’s The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of One Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, which focused on the Bulls’ 1990-91 season. Given the popularity of The Last Dance, Smith’s book has drawn renewed attention from readers nearly 30 years after it was first published.
The Jordan Rules is fondly remembered by many; in 2017, Bryan Curtis explored its legacy for The Ringer. “This is why we made due without Woj bombs back in 1991,” Curtis recalled. “Because The Jordan Rules was the mother of all Woj bombs.”
In an interview with Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker, Smith revisited The Jordan Rules and the changes that have taken place in the NBA since its publication. “I had extraordinary access that doesn’t exist anymore, in any form,” Smith said. For him, that’s a sign of changing times:
For a 7 p.m. game, Jordan would come at, like, 3 p.m. or something, so I’d get there and just talk with him for three hours. Now you’ve got ten minutes with guys, if that. LeBron is celebrated for being one of the few in the whole league who comes out before the game and gives the media five minutes. Jordan gave everybody three hours.
While he contends that the levels of access have changed, Smith does feel like a book with a similar impact could be written today. “There are great journalists now who could write a book like that,” he told Chotiner. “They just can’t get the access that I had.”
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