As people continue to celebrate the legacy of Michael Jordan with ESPN’s hit documentary series The Last Dance, WWE Hall of Famer Mark Henry recently told the story about he and the six-time NBA Champion had a tense conversation when the two first met. As he explained in an interview with 24/7 Sports, Henry was competing in an the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta when he met up with a few friends from the famous Men’s National team, including Karl Malone and Charles Barkley Unfortunately when Jordan walked up to the group, he was taken aback by Henry being there.
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“You would think in a perfect world that when somebody walks up on a group of people, they would just greet everybody, ‘Hey, guys. How you all doing? What’s going on?’ and go from there. Well, when Michael walked up, that wasn’t the case. I guess I seemed out of place,” Henry said. “And his response to me was, ‘Who are you?’ And I was like, ‘Who the hell are you?’ And you know, I started to get a little bit angry, because I was not expecting that.
“It was like a slap in the face. It’s like someone walking up and just slapping you,” he added. I was in shock. I was like this is Michael Jordan. And I’m angry, like, ‘Why? Why? What the hell?’ He backed off. ‘Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. My bad. I didn’t want to come across,’ but he did. And, I’m sure that that’s not the only time something like that has ever happened in this world, but it had been a long time since that happened to me, and I wasn’t having no parts of it.
Henry added — “My mother used to say, ‘Be careful what you say but even be more careful how you say it.’ And the way he said it to me was very disrespectful, I thought. And I checked him about it.”
Thankfully the story has a happy ending, as Jordan invited Michael to the following NBA All-Star Game in San Antonio, Texas.
“A lot of people don’t remember, but the All-Star game was coming up after that and it was in San Antonio. When that came through, he invited me to the All-Star game,” Henry said. “He was having his birthday party during the All-Star game. So, his people contacted me and got me a parking pass and VIP. It was all fine and good. It all ended well. It just didn’t start off. And like I said, that’s a blip on the radar.
