Photo: nba.com

Michael Jordan is fully aware he might come off as a horrible guy in the upcoming documentary focusing on his sixth and final season with the Chicago Bulls.

The 10-part series, called The Last Dance, will debut on ESPN this Sunday and just about every basketball fan is looking forward to watching, especially as there’s no basketball on television at the moment.

The six-time NBA champion was interviewed by The Athletic ahead of the series’ release and admitted that his titles did come at the expense of being perceived as a tyrant.

“Look, winning has a price,” he said. “And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates who came after me didn’t endure all the things that I endured.

“Once you joined the team, you lived at a certain standard that I played the game. And I wasn’t going to take any less. Now if that means I had to go in there and get in your a** a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates. The one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something that he didn’t f**king do.

“When people see this they are going say, ‘Well he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ Well, that’s you. Because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win to be a part of that as well. Look, I don’t have to do this. I am only doing it because it is who I am. That’s how I played the game. That was my mentality. If you don’t want to play that way, don’t play that way.”

Of course, it’s widely known that Jordan was not the most inviting teammate back in his playing days. But it appears that The Last Dance will lay bare his character in a way we’ve never seen before.