How Eminem blew his relationship with Michael Jordan
“Now if rap was B-ball,” Eminem raps on his verse on Kid Kudi’s ‘The Adventures Of Moon Man & Slim Shady,’ “I’d be Jordan-like.”
Em clearly respects Michael Jordan, as demonstrated by this lyric, but, when it came to actually meeting and potentially working with Jordan, he dropped the ball. Badly. Apparently the pair were in discussions to collaborate on some shoes, but Eminem messed things up. His instinct to crack jokes got the better of him.
Eminem spoke about the incident with Sway Colloway in 2020, appearing on Sway’s radio show on Em’s own Shade 45 channel on Sirius XM Radio. The rapper was speaking alongside his manager, Paul Rosenberg, and together they painted a picture of a very awkward encounter indeed.
“We were talking about doing some kind of shoe together,” Em said of his meeting with Jordan. “Everything was cool, he’s super cool, and everything was good until we get to the end of the phone call and I said, ‘Yo man when are you gonna come to Detroit so I can dunk on you.’”
That sounds innocent enough, but, as Em put it, he was met with “crickets.” Jordan hadn’t reacted all too well to what had been said, it seemed. “I don’t remember exactly what he said,” Em said, “but I think he just kinda of was like, ‘Ha ha ha.’ Like laughed. And I remember getting off the phone going, ‘Oh my God I think I might have just blew it.’”
Rosenberg stepped in to point out that, despite this little hiccup, Eminem and Jordan have since worked together. But clearly Em was still badly embarrassed about what had happened. “Because to me in my head it was a total joke, right?” he said. “It’s so ridiculous for me to think that I could dunk on Jordan, right?”
Eminem thought that the notion that he could “dunk on” Michael Jordan was so nakedly ridiculous that he was safe to say it. “It’s one of those things that you think is gonna be funnier in your head than when you actually say it,” he noted.
But when he hung up from the call, he felt very strongly that his joke hadn’t landed as intended. He realised that he hadn’t taken into account that Michael Jordan, above all else, is a sportsman, and those people, naturally, are fiercely competitive by nature.
“When I got off the phone,” Em said, “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t think he knew I was joking.’ ’Cause you know, he’s very competitive.”