Michael Jordan once made an extraordinary demand to a hotel after losing a game of table tennis to his teammate.
Jordan will forever be regarded as one of the best ever players to ever step foot on a basketball court.
During an illustrious career, Jordan won six NBA championships whilst playing for the Chicago Bulls.
After retiring from the sport, the American continued to be one of the biggest sportspersons in the world due to his work with Nike.
Jordan has also built up a reputation for being a serial winner and his competitiveness was on show during the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
Speaking to Slam Online in a podcast back in 2017, NBA photographer Nathaniel Butler said Jordan ordered a ping pong table to be delivered to his room after losing to teammate Christian Laettner.
He said: “These guys are all competitive. They see a ping pong table, the first thing is make the brackets. First thing. Boom. Boom. Boom.
“For some reason, Christian Laettner was good at ping pong. So, Laettner and Jordan in the finals. Like, there was some side action going on, we’ll leave it at that. Michael is playing ping pong, sweating, like fourth-quarter-at-the-free-throw-line kind of sweat. For some reason, Laettner beat him. He threw the paddle. He didn’t talk for two days to anyone.”
Butler added: “Come to find out, he had a ping-pong table delivered up to his room. No one knew about it. and he was practicing for the re-match. They had a re-match two days later, three days later. It was (something like) 21-4. He destroyed him.”
Jordan’s competitiveness once led to Kobe Bryant rejecting him for a game of golf.
Explaining his decision not to play golf with Jordan, Bryant said in an old interview, as per Basketball Network: “Michael is competitive in all things that don’t make sense.
“He would try to get me to play golf all the time. ‘Mike, I know about you. I’ve written book reports about you in elementary school. I know you started playing golf in North Carolina. So that means if I’m doing the math, you’ve been playing golf for like a hundred years. I have not picked up a golf club ever. The last thing you’re going to do is get me on a golf course and annihilate me. Not gonna do it.’”