You'll Want to Watch Another Hour of Michael Jordan Drinking, Smoking Cigars, and Being Extremely Candid

So this one is going to take a bit of exposition. And that's fine. I feel up to the job, like a fringe character shoehorned into a movie to provide much-needed but clunky backstory after some bad studio notes. In 2017, Michael Jordan sat down with Marvin R. Shanken, a man who enjoys the finer things in life and publishes multiple magazines about them, with Cigar Aficionado being the crown jewel.

The two men had a frank and engaging conversation for an hour while sucking down fancy cigars and Jordan nursed some brown liquor. It ruled. Parts of the interview have been released before, used for this or that and bandied about. But the full sitdown was only posted online less than a week ago. Our brave aggregating community has only begun to cultivate it for juicy nuggets.

Let the games begin. The best user experience is probably to relax with your own vice/vices of choice and see it in its entirety.

If you have a busy day, though, one of the TLDW things is that Jordan doesn't seem entirely confident in his ability to do what he did in this Twitter era.

""Tiger [Woods] played at his peak somewhere toward the end of my career. Then, what changed from that time-frame to now is social media -- Twitter and all those types of things. And that has invaded the personalities and personal time of individuals," Jordan told Cigar Aficionado. "It's to the point where some people have been able to utilize it to their financial gain and things of that nature. "But for someone like myself -- and this is what Tiger deals with -- I don’t know if I could’ve survived in this Twitter [era], where you don’t have the privacy that you’d want and what seems to be very innocent can always be misinterpreted.""

Remember, this was 2017. Things haven't gotten easier for NBA players in that department. There is more scrutiny and there was, like, this whole thing about them being in a bubble all year and the weight of so much social pressure on their shoulders. That's not to say Jordan wouldn't have been every bit the player he was in this era. But it does increasingly feel as though his personality would have been more molded by the outside world than it was in his past reality.

On an unrelated note, it's constantly amazing to see how many competent interviewers there out that one's never heard of. This Shanken is spectacular! Just asking questions has become a true art. So much so that the best in the business may have a food-eating show and the fastest-riser is a former soap opera star.

What a time to have recording equipment.