Was Rick Reilly's Rant on Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame Speech Full of Hot Air?

(Photo by Jim Rogash/Getty Images)

This post is really about Rick Reilly's reaction to Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame speech, and not so much about the speech itself.

Every once in awhile I like to torture myself by reading a piece written by Reilly. Reilly, of course, used to write the back page article for Sports Illustrated, and now writes for ESPN.

In the interest of full disclosure, he's also an award-winning sports writer who people seem to generally love. Admittedly, I like about 15 percent of his articles, but I generally find him terribly annoying.

I could be wrong, but he seems like he's that annoying guy who's always smiling while he talks or writes because he thinks he's much more funny and probably a tad bit smarter than you ever could be. That's just my perception though, and I could of course be wrong.

Anyway, Reilly decided to tear into Michael Jordan for his Hall of Fame speech in an article titled, "Be like Mike? No thanks." Here is the intro, and you can read the rest of the piece here:

Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame talk was the Exxon Valdez of speeches. It was, by turns, rude, vindictive, and flammable. And that was just when he was trying to be funny. It was tactless, egotistical, and unbecoming. When it was done, nobody wanted to be like Mike.

And yet we couldn't stop watching. Because this was an inside look into the mindset of an icon who'd never let anybody inside before. From what I saw, I'd never want to go back.

Here is a man who's won just about everything there is to win: six NBA titles, five MVPs, and two Olympics golds. And yet he sounded like a guy who's been screwed out of every trophy ever minted. He's the world's first sore winner.

In the entire 23-minute cringe-athon, there were only six thank yous, seven if you count his sarcastic rip at the very Hall that was inducting him. "Thank you, Hall of Fame, for raising ticket prices, I guess," he sneered.

By comparison, David Robinson's classy and heartfelt seven-minute speech had 17. Joe Montana's even shorter speech in Canton had 23. Who wrote your speech, Mike? Kanye West?

Did he really actually COUNT the number of times each person said thank you? Apparently Rick Reilly spends his free time judging acceptance speeches by how many times a person says thank you (and actually counting them to ensure accuracy). It looks like the more famous you are, the more you need to say thank you.

It really couldn't be more obvious from the jump that Reilly has a big axe to grind. I watched the speech today (although I read the article a couple weeks ago) and it never felt "rude, vindictive, or flammable."

Just to see if I was too biased against Reilly, I even had a few friends watch the speech, these were people who could care less about Michael Jordan, and they also found nothing in it to be any of those things either.

Not that Jordan's speech wasn't from the heart. It was. It's just that Jordan's heart on this night could give you frostbite.

Nobody was spared, including his high school coach, his high school teammate, his college coach, two of his pro coaches, his college roommate, his pro owner, his pro general manager, the man who was presenting him that evening, even his kids!

Since I don't want to pick apart ever single aspect of the article, I will comment that I'm not sure exactly how he went after some of these people. He thanked his college coach (Dean Smith) once, which I suppose is somewhat of a flammable comment.

He also made a reference to Smith leaving him off the cover of Sports Illustrated, and how that motivated him to be better.

I thought it was funny, but even if it wasn't, I don't know that Michael Jordan's inability to deliver a joke like Chris Rock somehow makes him a terrible person.

The whole speech is prefaced on the theme that Jordan wanted to tell people something they didn't already know about him. That "something" was how he developed, and maintained, his competitive drive from his childhood throughout his entire career.

He was thanking most of the aforementioned people for the motivation they provided, and he also pointed out that sometimes they were doing it knowingly, and sometimes they weren't.

He was also pretty clearly trying to be funny, and most of the people he was supposedly being rude to had huge smiles on their faces. That includes the the person that made Jordan's high school team the year he was cut.

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