That Time Michael Jordan Allegedly Ran Up a Million-Dollar Golf Debt

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Just before the 1993 NBA Finals, one of Jordan's golf buddies published "Michael & Me: Our Gambling Addiction...My Cry For Help!" The book is forgotten, but its lesson is not.

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Jordan was explaining, but pointedly not apologizing, for a visit to Atlantic City the night before Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals that either ended fairly late or very late, depending on whether you took the word of the best basketball player in the world or New York's tabloid sources. At halftime of a game in which he would lead all scorers, viewers saw Jordan expand upon this theme without quite changing his tune. Jordan was responding to a self-published book titled Michael & Me: Our Gambling Addiction...My Cry For Help! that had been released that week, and which had been excerpted in newspapers for weeks before. "I felt I was betrayed by this individual," Jordan said of the book's author, a 38-year-old San Diego sports executive named Richard Esquinas. "I don't consider him a friend, because friends don't do this to other friends."

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. The story that Esquinas sold about his peripatetic life of golf and gambling with Jordan, which allegedly involved Jordan running up a $1.2 million debt over a ten-day golf binge in San Diego—a debt Jordan supposedly played down to $908,000, negotiated down to $300,000, and ultimately paid $200,000 of—was bigger than the ones that had come before. But it wasn't new. When basketball fans were introduced Esquinas, they had already met James "Slim" Bouler, a golf hustler who was either a drug dealer or drug dealer-adjacent. In December of 1991, the feds seized a $57,000 check from Jordan to Bouler which the two first spun as a loan; later, as a witness in the federal case that would eventually earn Bouler a nine-year sentence, Jordan admitted that the check was repaying a gambling debt.

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In the interview with Rashad that aired at halftime of Game 1 of the 1993 NBA Finals, Jordan echoed that assessment with barely concealed exasperation. "Gambling is legal," he said, smiling mirthlessly, "betting is legal." "My wife, if I had a problem, would have left me," Jordan said. Rashad laughed lightly. Jordan picked up the pace: if he had a problem, he said, his family would have told him, his wife would have told him. "If I had a problem, I'd be starving, I'd be hocking this watch, my championship rings, I would sell my house," Jordan said. "My wife would have left me, my kids would be starving. I do not have a problem. I enjoy gambling."

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