Michael Jordan did more than most every other NBA player. He scored more points than his contemporaries, he won more titles than almost everybody, and he even led the NBA in retirements. His Airness announced his retirement three times — in 1993 to play baseball, after a sixth NBA championship in 1999, and in 2003 after a two-year comeback attempt. Michael Jordan’s last gasp at basketball greatness with the Washington Wizards is usually viewed as an aberration, a tarnish on his otherwise flawless, 13-season career with the Chicago Bulls. But Michael Jordan’s time in D.C. wasn’t exactly an embarrassment. In the 2001-2002 season, Jordan played in 60 games and averaged 22.9 points per game — roughly the same as he’d put up in 1985-1986. His season cut short by a knee injury — he was 38 at the time, which is plenty old for an NBA player — Jordan returned in 2002 to play all 82 games of the regular season, and scored an average of 20 points a night. Jordan led the Wizards to 37-45 records in both of his campaigns with the team. That wasn’t good enough to make the playoffs, but it did mark a dramatic improvement. In 2000-2001, the last year the Wizards had played without Jordan, they tallied a paltry 19-63 record. Michael Jordan absolutely turned the Wizards around.

Any conversation about the greatest basketball player of all time almost always includes Michael Jordan. He’s a viable candidate, but detractors — those who may argue the superiority of Kobe Bryant or LeBron James — may say that Jordan’s statistics, achievements, and number of championships should be taken with a grain of salt. They’re only so astronomical, proponents of this theory may argue, because the NBA in general just wasn’t as good in Michael Jordan’s day as it was later, that there is more superstar parity around the league and that stacked teams abound. Jordan, it would seem, carried not just the Chicago Bulls but the NBA.

Michael Jordan wasn’t unbeatable — his Bulls frequently lost in the playoffs, and five of their six title wins came in series pushed to six games. In 1997 and 1998, Jordan and the Bulls faced the Utah Jazz in the finals, led by Karl Malone, who in his career actually outscored Jordan, 36,928 to 32,292. And on the way to those six championships, the Bulls had to beat seven teams that had won at least 60 regular-season games. In 1993, the title-winning Bulls finished second in the Eastern Conference behind the New York Knicks. The rest of the league gave Jordan some competition — and in 1992, he’d join quite a few of them on what’s probably the greatest basketball team ever assembled.

In the fifth game of the 1997 NBA Finals between the Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz, Jordan scored 38 points, leading his team to a 90-88 victory, and a crucial 3-2 game lead en route to a title-clinching sixth game. What made Jordan’s play more impressive: He’d been sick as a dog. “I was really tired and very weak,” Jordan said after the game, adding that at halftime he asked coach Phil Jackson to use him only “in spurts.” While Michael Jordan’s symptoms match those of influenza, Jordan’s personal trainer at the time, Tim Grover, believes Jordan had fallen ill with food poisoning. Grover told TrueHoop TV (via ESPN) that the night before Game 5, Jordan got hungry in his Utah hotel room and ordered a pizza. When it arrived, it was suspiciously delivered by five people. Grover took the pizza and handed it off to Jordan and his cronies. “I said, ‘I got a bad feeling about this,'” he said. Jordan was the only person in the room that night who ate the pizza, and thus the only person who got sick. It’s a theory that Jackson and Jordan’s Bulls teammate Ron Harper have floated, too. “You know, Ronnie Harper always thought it was a bad food type of thing,” Jackson told ESPN in 2012.

Michael Jordan is also known by Air Jordan, a rightfully bestowed nickname alluding to his ability to seemingly fly up off the court somewhere around the three-point line and all the way to the rim to deliver a thunderous dunk. Air Jordan is also the name of Jordan’s line of Nike-produced athletic shoes — he’d model them on the court and millions who wanted to be “like Mike” would pony up a couple hundred bucks for a pair. Jordan still makes about $100 million via his Nike contract each year — while the company pulls in about $2.8 billion in Air Jordans and related merchandise. Ever since, big-money shoe contracts built around signature sneakers are the name of the game for NBA superstars — as of 2020, 16 active NBA players had their “own” shoe, including LeBron James, Steph Curry, and Damian Lillard. Jordan may have popularized the concept, but he didn’t invent it. In 1973 New York Knicks star Clyde Frazier rocked Puma Clydes, the first basketball player signature shoe, followed soon after by Julius Erving and his Dr. J Converse Pro Leather shoe. Air Jordans weren’t even the first “Air” shoe Nike made — those would be Air Force Ones, which hit stores in 1982, three years before the first Jordan sneakers.

In 1993, 30-year-old Michael Jordan did something very strange: He retired. “I’ve reached the pinnacle and I’ve achieved a lot in a short period,” Jordan told reporters. “I don’t have anything else to prove.” Jordan also emphasized that the sudden, violent death of his father the previous July didn’t influence his decision, that he’d been long considering a pursuit of “a normal life.” But just four months later, Jordan abandoned retirement to play baseball, joining the minor league organization of the Chicago White Sox, a team which, like the Chicago Bulls, was owned by Jerry Reinsdorf. And then just over a year later, in March 1995, Jordan returned to the NBA. Such a strange sequence of events led to speculation that perhaps Michael Jordan didn’t really “retire” at all — and that, in an image-saving move, he was secretly suspended by the NBA after his penchant for high-stakes gambling got him into trouble.

In 1992, according to Bleacher Report, Jordan testified in a trial of convicted drug dealer James Bouler as to why the defendant had a personal check from Jordan in the amount of $57,000. At first Jordan claimed it was a loan, then admitted it was a payment on a gambling debt. In early 1993, businessman Richard Equinas wrote in his gambling addiction memoir that he’d won $900,000 in golf bets from Jordan, and then before a game of that year’s Eastern Conference Finals, Jordan was spotted in a casino. After the Bulls won their third championship, the NBA investigated if Jordan’s gambling violated any rules. Four months later, Jordan “retired,” remarking that a comeback was possible “if the Bulls will have me, if [commissioner] David Stern lets me back in the league.” Do all these threads connect? We may never know.