What I learned from reading Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby.
It took the fewest of words to set him off, sometimes nothing more than the faintest trace of a smirk.
He was also capable of making things up, conjuring up on a front out of thin air.
That's what they would all realize.
Afterward, he would seize on apparently meaningless cracks or gestures and plunge them deep into his heart until they glowed radioactively, the nuclear fuel rods of his great fire.
Only much later would the public come to understand just how incapable he was of letting go of even the tiniest details.
Many observers mistakenly thought that these affronts were laughable things of Michael's own manufacture little devices to spur his competitive juices, and that he would jokingly toss them aside when he was done with them after he had rung another sweaty victory from the evening.
But he could not let them go any more than he could shed his right arm.
They were as organic to his being as his famous tongue.
Many of the things that deeply offended Michael Jordan were hardly the stuff of stinging rebuke, except perhaps the very first one, which, as it later turned out, was the most important of all.
Just go in the house with the women.
Of the millions of sentences that James Jordan uttered to his youngest son, this one was the one that glowed neon bright across the decades, his father's mean words had activated deep within some errant strain of DNA, a mutation of competitive nature so strong as to almost seem titanium.
Years later, during the early days of his NBA career, he confessed that it was his father's early treatment of him and his dad's declaration of his worthlessness that became the driving force that motivated him.
Each accomplishment that he achieved was his battle cry for defeating his father's negative opinions of him.
Michael paid him back again and again by achieving so much in a life that his father could never hope to grasp.
That is what offspring of disapproving fathers often do.
Without even realizing it, they lock in on an answer and deliver it over and over, confirming that they do not need to just go in the house.
And they continue to confirm it even after the father has gone to dust, as if they are unconsciously yelling across time in an argument with the old man.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Michael Jordan, the life.
And it was written by Roland Lazenby.
Remember that part about his father for the end?