Yes, there was some wink-wink teasing with his beloved Dean Smith, but make no mistake: Jordan revealed himself to be strangely bitter. You won, Michael. You won it all. Yet he keeps chasing something that he’ll never catch, and sometimes, well, it all seems so hollow for him.I read a chunk of Dweck's Mindset this summer and was thinking about that as I read about how MJ rolled off grievances and pointed out when coaches and teammates underestimated him in the past. Dweck's major thesis is that people's growth-oriented mindsets are what set them apart from those who see talent as a fixed finite quality that we either have or don't. She points to athletes who find fault with everyone but themselves versus those who continually see ways to improve themselves.
You have to wonder if the drive to improve himself would've been there at all if not for this obvious resent he held for those he felt hadn't given him a fair shot. Maybe anger is a better motivator for improvement than idealism. Could he have spent hours upon hours perfecting his game without all the wrongs he suffered? We'll never know.
